Whats Next

What's Next

Help the user choose their next piece of work from the bean tracker. The value here is judgment, not a JSON dump: resume before you start, group related work, and only surface beans that are genuinely actionable. This skill is read-only with respect to bean state — it surfaces and recommends; task-implementer owns status changes.

Step 1 — Gather state

Pull in-progress and ready work together, with enough relationship context to reason about blockers and containers in one pass:

beans query --json '{
  inProgress: beans(filter: { status: ["in-progress"] }) {
    id title type priority
    children { id title status }
  }
  ready: beans(filter: { excludeStatus: ["completed", "scrapped", "draft", "in-progress"], isBlocked: false, excludeImplicitTerminal: true }) {
    id title type priority
    parent { id title type status }
    children { id title status }
    blockedBy { id title status }
  }
}'

excludeImplicitTerminal: true matches beans list --ready semantics: it drops beans that inherit a terminal status from a scrapped/completed ancestor (which excludeStatus alone would miss, since that bean's own status is still todo). The plain CLI equivalents (beans list --json -s in-progress, beans list --json --ready) work too, but the GraphQL query gives you parent, children, and blockedBy statuses in a single call — which the next steps need.

Step 2 — Resume beats starting

If anything is in-progress, present it first and lead with it. A half-finished bean is almost always the right next move over starting something new — finishing reduces work-in-flight. Note any in-progress bean that is a container (has children) so the user knows the real work is in a child.

Step 3 — Present ready work with judgment

Group ready beans by parent epic/feature, not as a flat list. Under each group show id, title, and type. Then apply three checks so the list reflects reality, not raw fields:

• Real blockers only. A bean listed under blockedBy is only actually blocked if that blocker is not completed. A blocked-by whose blocker is already done is not blocked — surface it as available. (We hit exactly this with nimbus-ibzl.) The isBlocked: false filter handles the common case, but verify any blockedBy you display.
• Flag containers. A bean with children is usually a container, not something to implement directly — point at its actionable children instead of the container itself.
• Respect priority. Order within a group by priority (critical → high → normal → low → deferred) so the obvious candidate floats up.

Step 4 — Recommend, then let the user choose

First lay out the candidates in a markdown table so the user can compare at a glance. One row per actionable bean, ordered with your recommended pick at the top. Mark the recommendation with a ⭐ in a leading column so it stands out:

Then call AskUserQuestion to capture the selection — it gives the user clickable options instead of forcing them to type a bean id. Use a single question (header Next bean), one option per candidate. Put the recommended bean first with (Recommended) appended to its label, and use each option's description for the one-line rationale. The user can always pick "Other" to name a bean outside the list.

Step 5 — Hand off

Once the user selects a bean, hand off to the task-implementer skill with the chosen bean id. Do not change the bean's status yourself — task-implementer validates the bean and sets it in-progress as part of its own loop.