setup-task-tracking

Setup Task Tracking

Make the harness's to-do list a standing habit — in force before a task starts, rather than something the user asks for once a task has gone sideways.

Both harnesses already ship the tool: Claude Code TodoWrite, Codex update_plan. Nothing installs them and no setting turns them on — what decides whether they get used is the prose loaded at session start. So this skill installs prose, into the file that is always in context.

That file is the project's agent-facing doc, and the reason is the standing part: rules/*.md load lazily, by paths: glob, once a matching file is touched — by which time the list that should have opened the task is already late. The doc is read before the first move.

1. Pick the file to wire

Write to the project docs that already exist:

• Both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md present, and CLAUDE.md merely imports AGENTS.md (its whole body is @AGENTS.md)? Wire AGENTS.md only — wiring both would duplicate the section via the import.
• Both present and independent? Wire both.
• Only one present? Wire that one, and leave the other absent. A stub AGENTS.md holding nothing but this section is worse than no file: the harness that reads it gets a project doc missing every convention the real one carries, and the two drift from the first commit.
• Neither present? Create AGENTS.md, and say so in the report — you are creating the project's first agent-facing doc, which is a bigger act than this skill was asked for.

Done when every file you will write is named and the ones you deliberately left alone are named too.

2. Write the section

Copy verbatim into each wired file. The thresholds are what make it work — a softened version ("consider tracking progress") reads as optional and changes nothing:

## Task tracking

Maintain a live to-do list for any task with **three or more distinct steps**,
edits across **multiple files**, or **a plan the user approved**. Claude Code:
`TodoWrite`. Codex: `update_plan`.

- Write the list **before the first edit**, not as a retrospective summary.
- Exactly **one** item `in_progress` at a time; mark it `completed` the moment it
  is done, not in a batch at the end.
- One item = one verifiable outcome. "Fix the bug" is a task; "read the file" is
  not.
- Keep single-step edits, lookups, and conversational turns off the list — a
  one-item list is noise, and a list nobody needed teaches the next session to
  ignore lists.

Adapt only the tool names, and only to match reality: name the harnesses this project actually uses, and drop the rest. A section naming a tool the running agent doesn't have is a section it learns to discount.

Where a ## Task tracking section already exists, replace it in place — a second copy makes the doc self-contradicting the first time the two versions drift.

Done when each wired file holds exactly one ## Task tracking section.

3. Report

Name the file(s) wired, the harnesses named in the section, and that it takes effect on the next session or /clear — a project doc already in context is not re-read mid-session.