# Groom > Always-on backlog grooming. Tidy, brainstorm, interrogate, investigate, research, and simplify in a single loop. Tidy is not a mode — it happens every time. Strategic-layer work is a mega-sweep: swarm investigation, external research, critique, synthesis, and backlog shaping across product, codebase, docs, infrastructure, ops, architecture, system design, value prop, and agent readiness. Use when: "groom", "what should we build", "rethink this", "biggest opportunity", "backlog", "prioritize", "backlog session", "audit skills", "skill quality audit". Trigger: /groom, /groom audit, /backlog, /rethink, /moonshot, /scaffold. - Skill: `phrazzld/groom` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 6 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add phrazzld/groom` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/phrazzld/groom/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Product & Planning - Author: phrazzld (https://skillmd.com/u/phrazzld) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/phrazzld/groom --- # /groom Keep `backlog.d/` true and make the project more ambitious. Normal strategic `/groom` is a mega-sweep, not triage: boil the ocean on purpose, then distill it into a world-class plan and backlog diff. A groom that only lists, lightly prioritizes, or emits a tiny handful of issues is incomplete unless the user explicitly scoped the run down. The backlog diff is the artifact. Prose exists to justify it. Groom is a conversation at the seams where the operator's judgment is the scarce input. At intake, interrogate the operator on ambition, vision deltas, and hidden priors so the sweep aims true — the `grill-me`-style posture in `harnesses/shared/references/interrogate-first.md` is the default here, not a fallback gated on whether they arrived with a backlog item. The investigation sweep itself stays autonomous — explore the codebase for what it can answer; reserve interrogation for the operator's judgment, not for facts you can read. If the groom produces a giant synthesis, use `julius-caveman` compression for interim summaries, not for the committed backlog text. ## Project Vision Every strategic groom creates, refreshes, or explicitly validates a durable project vision before ranking work. Vision is the north star that makes brainstorming and backlog movement coherent; without it, grooming collapses into local cleanup. - If a project already has a canonical vision or strategy artifact, read it early and use it to judge every theme, deletion, emission, and next pickup. - If none exists, draft the smallest durable vision artifact the repo can own. Prefer root `VISION.md` as a first-class repository artifact; use `docs/product.md`, a roadmap doc, or a clearly named backlog epic only when repo evidence says root vision is the wrong fit. Treat creating it as a first-class groom emission. - Use `/vision` when creating or materially revising root `VISION.md`; groom consumes the north star instead of hand-rolling a parallel strategy doc. - Keep the vision concrete: audience, job-to-be-done, category, standards, non-goals, strategic bets, and what excellent looks like in 6-12 months. - Revise the vision when live evidence contradicts it. Do not bury direction changes in chat, issue comments, or the final report only. - Use the vision to backchain: themes and tickets should say which part of the vision they advance, de-risk, simplify, or deliberately reject. - A vision or moonshot artifact can carry a one-glance **system map** when the relationships, scope, or sequencing are too complex for prose alone. Generate it only when it earns that role: `harnesses/shared/references/image-generation.md`. ## Tidy (mandatory, mechanical) Tooling owns closure; consume it, don't hand-roll it: ```sh default="$(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD 2>/dev/null | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@')" cargo run --locked -p harness-kit-checks -- backlog ids-from-range "origin/${default:-main}..${default:-main}" cargo run --locked -p harness-kit-checks -- backlog archive "$id" # idempotent ``` - Archive every ticket closed by `Closes-backlog:`/`Ships-backlog:` trailers or marked done/shipped in frontmatter. Commit as `chore(backlog): archive shipped tickets swept by /groom`. - Flag stale `in-progress` (merged/deleted branch, or 30+ days untouched). - Surface duplicates with a proposed consolidation — never merge silently. - **Backlog size is telemetry, not policy.** If the active queue looks too broad, report the evidence: count, age, duplicates, stale owners, orphaned themes, and unfocused small items. Consolidate only when tickets genuinely share one outcome. Never veto an evidenced emission because of an arbitrary item count. Trailer canon lives in `meta/CONTRACTS.md`. Emit trailers only via `git interpret-trailers`; hand-formatted variants are invisible to tooling. ## Delegation Judgment Delegate on judgment per the shared Roster contract: native subagents by default; add cross-model critics, roster providers, or sprite lanes (`/sprites`) only when they answer a distinct question. See `harnesses/shared/AGENTS.md` (Roster). Local lane guidance: strategic grooming uses swarms by default. Launch independent lanes for product/value, operator experience, runtime reliability, architecture, simplification/deletion, security/privacy, docs/onboarding, ops/infra, testing/verification, agent readiness, and external exemplars. The lead keeps final prioritization. ## Mega Sweep For any strategic groom, load `references/mega-groom.md`. It is the contract for swarm size, coverage map, source matrix, output shape, and the "world-class plan" bar. Use `references/investigation-bench.md` only for lane prompt shapes; it is a template library, not the whole run. ## Ambition Floor Calibrate scope to what frontier agents can execute, not what a human team can staff. Execution is cheap; vision is the scarce input. Strategic grooming must describe the best version of the whole project, then backchain from that standard into epics, deletions, sequencing, and first pickups. - **Brainstorm deep, from perspectives composed for this repo.** There is no canonical list of layers to sweep. Pick the obvious axes this codebase demands, then add lenses no stock list would hand you — invert a premise, borrow from an adjacent domain, ask what a competitor, operator, or first-time user would notice. Fan the perspectives out as parallel fresh-context lanes; pull in `/research` when outside knowledge would change a verdict. When the sweep keeps returning the obvious (the *mundane harvest* failure), route the divergence through `nous-creative-ideation` — a routed library of named methods (lateral provocations, analogy/biomimicry, premortem-and-inversion) that manufactures non-obvious lenses on purpose. The bar is genuine diversity and depth of exploration, judged fresh each session. - **Describe the best version of this software,** not the next safe increment: elegant, easy to change, personalizable, delightful, operationally boring, and valuable enough to matter. The distance between that vision and the live repo is backlog material; close it with epics. - **Epic-scoped by default.** Strategic emissions are epics — a product outcome with an ordered child sequence — never pre-shredded tasks. Small items exist as children of an epic or as genuine isolated fixes. - **Ambition is not slop.** Every epic's premise survives the same vetting as any finding: open the file, run the command. A perspective that comes back with "all fine here" is making a claim — vet it like one. The floor raises scope, not tolerance for unevidenced claims. ## Judgment (the actual grooming) Investigate before opining. A tidy-only pass exists, but only when the user asks for one; any other session owes the `references/mega-groom.md` sweep, with genuinely independent perspectives run in parallel and `/research` when outside context would change a verdict. Fresh-context lanes exist to decorrelate judgment, not to fill a roster. - **Read the live code, not just ticket text.** Hotspots, debt concentrations, the oldest stuck ticket. Every codebase has findings; "everything is fine" means the investigation was shallow. - **Challenge premises of the top items.** Symptom or root cause? A ticket's framing is a first draft. Reframe before re-ranking. - **Propose deletions.** The best groom shrinks the backlog. Every deletion is a proposal with rationale — humans ratify removals. - **Audit the repo's own harness.** Agent readiness is backlog work, not a separate ceremony: does this repo have a verification skill with its real routes/commands (the highest-impact skill category)? Verified build/test/ lint commands and conventions an agent can discover cold? Runbooks for its deployed surfaces? A CI gate that would catch the likely failure? A meaningful, enforced quality floor that gates the diff and ratchets legacy debt, or only advisory, arbitrary gates (`harnesses/shared/references/quality-gates.md`)? Security gates that catch secret leaks in files and Git/PR metadata before publication? Stale AGENTS/CLAUDE prose? Product context a cold agent would need? Each gap is a ticket like any other. - **Vet findings before presenting them.** Re-check each claim against the live repo — open the file, run the command. A plausible finding that doesn't survive a second look is noise that erodes trust in the whole groom. - **Theme, then recommend.** Group findings by shared root cause, rank by impact discounted by confidence — effort barely discounts now that agents execute — and argue for one concrete action per theme. Synthesis stays on the lead; when the plan is contestable, land it with the operator the same `grill-me` way — walk the decision tree (sequencing, deletions, the next pickup) one branch at a time, recommending each — instead of dropping the full plan for a rubber-stamp. ## Ticket Standard `backlog.d/-.md`, bare numeric IDs. ```markdown # Priority: P0–P3 · Status: pending|ready|blocked|in-progress|done|shipped|abandoned · Estimate: S–XL ## Goal <one sentence — outcome, not mechanism> ## Oracle - [ ] <mechanically verifiable; rough oracles are still oracles> ## Verification System - Claim: - Falsifier: - Driver: - Grader: - Evidence packet: - Cadence: ## Notes <constraints, prior art, open questions> ``` Epics are the default shape for strategic emissions: same file, plus a `## Children` section — ordered child outcomes that stay inline until picked up, then graduate to their own tickets. An epic still needs a Goal and an Oracle for the whole arc; "umbrella" files with no done criteria are storage, not epics. Every active ticket has Goal + Oracle; fix or demote anything that doesn't. For M+ work or anything promoted to `Status: ready`, add the verification system from `harnesses/shared/references/verification-system-first.md`. M+ tickets promoted to `Status: ready` follow `/shape`'s `references/prd-ticket-quality.md`; otherwise they stay raw ideas. When grooming Harness Kit itself, apply the product lens in `references/backlog-doctrine.md`. ## Output 1. **Tidy diff** — archived, flipped, flagged; by ID, no padding. 2. **Source matrix** — swarm lanes, local commands, external research, skipped/failed lanes, and what each contributed. 3. **World-class plan** — project vision, gaps, themes, sequencing, deletion/consolidation candidates, and the one best next pickup. 4. **Emissions** — epic/ticket edits with `**Why:**` naming the evidence lane. Strategic emissions should show breadth across the domain map, not just the easiest implementation slice. 5. **Residual** — open questions, blocked dependencies, unverified areas, and what would make the sweep stronger. Apply non-destructive backlog edits when the user asked for grooming. Deletions, abandonments, and silent merges stay proposals unless explicitly approved. ## Audit Mode `/groom audit` is a read-only harness-health report, not a grooming run: ```sh cargo run --locked -p harness-kit-checks -- telemetry --repo . ``` It summarizes skill/prompt usage from hook logs (and staleness vs last edit). Read it with judgment: low usage with high value-when-used is fine — say so; low usage with no story is a deletion candidate. Present findings ordered by severity; do not auto-fix. ## Refuse - Never auto-delete or silently merge tickets. - Never archive a ticket whose trailer points at an unmerged branch. - Never let backlog size alone veto an evidenced ticket or epic. - Never call a strategic groom complete after a tiny issue set unless the user explicitly asked for a narrow pass. - Never skip the swarm when subagent, peer CLI, or sprite lanes are available; if all delegation is blocked, report degraded mode and do the local matrix. ## Gotchas - **Menu, not grooming.** Themes without a defended recommendation are a report. Pick one action per theme and argue it. - **Mundane harvest.** A strategic session that only finds small, safe work is not done. Widen the swarm, add external research, invert the premise, and inspect neglected surfaces before concluding the repo has no ambitious, evidence-backed moves. - **Stock-lens grooming.** Running the same investigator roster in every repo is process, not thought. The revealing perspectives are the ones composed for this codebase, this session. - **Over-decomposing.** An agent-hour of work is one ticket, not three; a coherent multi-ticket ambition is one epic, not ten orphan tasks. - **Backlog as graveyard.** Age is a stale signal, not an automatic verdict. Inspect branch, owner, and live relevance before flipping, archiving, or proposing deletion. - **Accepting the ticket's framing.** Five-whys the top items before re-ranking them. ## Verification `/groom audit` (above) scores skill quality; backlog mechanics are enforced by `harness-kit-checks backlog` subcommands. A groom run ends with a clean tree: archives committed, emissions written, deletions awaiting ratification.