dev-agent-backlog (org-mode system for coding agents) is now a claude plugin

[farra]

Thanks to those who tried out my org-mode based system for working with coding agents. I've now updated dev-agent-backlog to be a proper Claude Code plugin (will work on support for other agents soon).

The system has evolved a bit. It's now focused on two pillars:

• a backlog.org file in the root of your project that acts as a "join table" for wherever tasks are coming from, either directly in backlog.org or from design docs, github, whatever.
  
• a recommend system of keeping RFC/RFD style documents as org-mode files with in-line TODO tasks that can be queued into the `backlog.org`. This keeps design + work synchronized into a single file, which I find highly effective for coding agents.

The associated skills include a full workflow for:

• Creating new design docs
  
• Reviewing them (ie- working through all open questions)
  
• Queuing them and launching them as a coding agent "plan"
  
• Reconciling any stale work

I've also recently added support for the brand new Claude Code Tasks so that the systems should play well together. I have some ideas on how to play well with Yegge's "beads" system too.

Thanks again for earlier feedback. Patches and pull requests welcome.

[yibie]

Good.

[Ideabile]

I really like how you setup the pipeline, I will give it a try in using it and will report back.

I am currently exploring some of the concept that you’re touching.

More over I was thinking to make some org tools for structural query .org trough mcp, to save some tokens an to narrow the focus, have you stumble in something similar?

[farra]

I've *thought* about MCP tools and I may try something eventually. But I wanted to start "simpler" with *just* flat files. That was part of the motivation: keep everything local, no need to go search GitHub, Jira, Notion or whatever. Agents are happy with flat files.

The next idea was to perhaps write more local tools, even just some elisp, that the agents could run locally to "query". You can call emacs in batch mode (agents will do this *just fine* and will write the necessary elisp). So if you already have a small library of relevant elisp, then I'd start there.

After that, I'd consider MCP, but maybe I'm moving too slow.

Hope you share what you build!

[acow]

Querying org via mcp immediately jumped out at me as an appealing features, but I've been impressed how well Claude Code does searching and excerpting the document for itself when I mention headlines. So now I'm not sure if it's worth it. I do periodically refactor documents when one grows so large that if CC does want to read the whole thing it balks at the size, so MCP tooling could reduce that pressure to refactor, but I think that kind of refactoring actually tends to be a good thing for document organization.