Workthreads

Workthreads

A lead needs a weekly answer across the team's repos: what work happened this week, what got finished, and what is still open and needs a next step. Workthreads produces that rollup from SpecStory histories - the .specstory/history transcripts your coding agents already write. It reports lines of work and their lifecycle (new / open / recently closed).

A deterministic engine (scripts/workthreads.mjs threads) does the retrieval, clustering, and classification; you do the synthesis - you turn its evidence into the lead's weekly report. Do not try to read raw transcripts yourself; they can be hundreds of thousands of lines. Run the engine and write the rollup from its output.

This skill is harness-portable (agentskills.io format). Where it names a specific tool (e.g. AskUserQuestion), treat that as "use your harness's equivalent; fall back to plain chat."

How the engine splits the work

• The engine groups the window's beats by project and clusters them into threads (a line of work that can span several sessions). It assigns each thread one lifecycle status relative to today:
  • new - first activity within the last 7 days.
  • open - unresolved, still active (the open loops).
  • closed - latest outcome was success and the thread has gone quiet; flagged reverted when a beat ran a rollback command (git revert / git reset --hard / git checkout -- ...).
• Output is deterministic (stable sort, no wall-clock timestamps in the body), so two runs on the same corpus are byte-identical.

Default flow: the weekly rollup

1. Index the corpus into workthreads' own DB. Point at the team's repos and build/update it:

   node "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/workthreads.mjs" index --projects <parent-of-repos> --db <db>
   # or a single tree:  --scan <root>     or a single history dir:  --dir <dir>
   

2. Run threads cross-project for the last 7 days and capture the evidence:

   node "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/workthreads.mjs" threads --db <db> --days 7            # human digest
   node "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/workthreads.mjs" threads --db <db> --days 7 --json     # machine-readable
   

   The digest prints, per project, three sections in order - New, Open, Recently closed - each thread with its evidence refs (path:line), last-activity date, status, and a reverted marker. --json emits an array of threads (project, status, reverted, the files touched, last-activity date).

3. Write the rollup from that evidence, in the lead's shape:

   • (a) a high-level result: session count and active projects in the window;
   • (b) per-project highlights of completed work (the closed threads);
   • (c) open loops - the open threads, unresolved or needing verification, with a suggested next step each;
   • (d) notable rollbacks / abandoned efforts (the reverted threads);
   • (e) cite evidence refs (path:line) so each claim is checkable. Add a caveat that the week may still be in progress, so open and new threads are snapshots, not final outcomes.

4. Save it to a dated file so the rollup is durable and diffable week over week:

   .specstory/workthreads/<YYYY>-W<week>.md
   

   (ISO week number, e.g. .specstory/workthreads/2026-W25.md). Also offer threads --out <file> to drop the raw digest beside your written summary.

Guided start

If the user just invokes the skill with no specifics, ask three short questions (use AskUserQuestion or plain chat), then run the default flow with the answers:

• Scope - which repos / parent directory holds the team's .specstory/history corpus?
• Window - how many days back? (default 7 for the weekly rollup; --days N to widen.)
• Goal - the whole rollup, just the open loops, just recently closed, or a quick status line? Tailor which sections you emphasize to the answer.

Conventions

Node ESM only, zero dependencies, Node >= 22.5. No em dashes anywhere (use " - "). The engine path never calls an LLM or the network; all judgment (the written narrative, suggested next steps, emphasis) is yours.