Next Card

When to invoke

Invoke when the user says "what's next", "pick something", "work on the queue", "what should I do", "next item", "drain the deck", or initiates autonomous-loop work. Kanban pull principle — work is taken, not pushed.

Context

Before running the body of this skill, the agent should see current deck state. Run these via the goc tool (top-level filters like --status / --tag / --worker map to the tool's flags parameter; the subcommand maps to verb). For bare-queue listings with no subcommand, shell out via the exec tool:

• goc --status active -v 2>&1 | head -20
• goc --ready -v${GOC_WORKER:+ --worker "$GOC_WORKER"}

Pick the next card

Kanban's pull principle (Anderson): work is taken when capacity is ready, not pushed by a planner. The runner — human or autonomous loop — pulls one card at a time, top of the value-sorted queue, gated by the autonomy ladder so a cron run cannot accidentally land a research-impacting decision unsupervised. The deck is the queue; this skill is the picker.

Recommend, do not claim. Status does NOT flip here — that is the advance-card skill's contract. The pull is a two-step gesture (pick, then claim) so the human or /loop can abort between them without half-state on disk.

Before recommending, read the active slice above. Active cards are claimed soft locks; avoid recommending the same card or adjacent/conflicting work unless the user explicitly asks to continue that active card.

Optional argument — if non-empty (a title or area like an area tag or path prefix), narrow the queue. If empty, scan the full ready slice (--ready keeps cards with open advances prereqs — they are pullable with an "awaiting: (you may start)" advisory line, since advances is a soft "should precede" not a hard start-gate; hard waits are expressed via waiting_on / waiting_until).

Selection criteria

goc lists open cards sorted by value desc then created asc. The top entry is the auto-pick candidate, subject to the autonomy gate below.

Contribution ladder

high outranks medium outranks low. Tags refine:

• contribution: high — wrong algorithm vs. cited literature, silent state corruption, broken public API, default config that contradicts the science. Doc claims that contradict an authoritative source — tags: [documentation] + contribution: high is the high-impact doc-quality slot. Treat these as load-bearing.
• contribution: medium — tolerance creep, vacuous assertions, tests that pass for the wrong reason, missing guard rails.
• contribution: low — README pinned-metric stale, docstring documents removed flag, stale references.

Effort / independence / reversibility

• Effort — files touched, area of the project (library code vs application code, test coverage required). Library default changes carry higher cost.
• Independence — fixes whose effect can be verified without first fixing another card ship before the dependent ones. Read the body's "Why it matters" notes and any advanced_by: chain.
• Reversibility — prefer fixes with low blast radius. Local demo edits before library changes.

Autonomy gate (the human_gate field)

Every card carries human_gate: none | decision | session:

• none — autonomous-loop-safe; cron may auto-pick.
• decision — needs ONE human go/no-go before work proceeds. The body MUST already carry the framing in a ## Decision required section (per the card-schema skill). The human resolves asynchronously.
• session — needs interactive working session. Research-impacting framework derivations, open architectural choices.

Pickability rule (uniform across cron, /loop, explicit-by-title):

• none → recommend.
• decision → DO NOT recommend. End the session cleanly with a one-line summary pointing at the parked card and (if available) its body's ## Decision required recommendation line. Do not pause an idle agent. No commits, no half-step writes — control returns to the human at their convenience.
• session → refuse to auto-pick under autonomous mode; ask for explicit confirmation under interactive mode that "yes, this is the working session for this topic." On no/silence, end like decision.

Autonomous-mode rule (/loop, cron, or any non-interactive invocation): walk down --ready and recommend the top. If every ready candidate is decision or session, the run halts with a one-line summary listing the parked cards. Better to ship nothing than to land a research move without a review checkpoint.

Explicit invocation by title: read the named card via goc show <title> and check the gate. Apply the rules above on the specific card.

Reclassify after reading

The human_gate is a hypothesis from the filing round; the body often reveals the real shape. Before recommending work, re-check whether the fix would:

• Close (or reopen) a gap in docs/framework/*.md.
• Pick one of two literature-backed mechanism candidates.
• Set a sign / direction convention.
• Introduce a new named primitive.
• Flip a default whose rationale is documented against a paper or axiom.
• Update an empirical / publication-tier claim.

If any apply, the gate should be at least decision (likely session). Recommend escalation via the advance-card skill to fix the gate, not working it autonomously. The right move is a 2-line edit to the frontmatter + (if upgrading to decision) writing the ## Decision required section in the body — then the run ends and the human comes back.

Output

A single recommendation with:

• Slug + one-line subject of the recommended card.
• 2-line rationale — contribution, why it's the highest-leverage open pick, any advanced_by edges that matter.
• Next-step pointer: typically "Run the advance-card skill (with <title> active) to claim, then work it." If gated decision or session, point at the parked framing and end.

The output is a recommendation, not a plan. The user (or /loop) picks whether to actually run the advance-card skill next.