Pick an issue

Protect the user's attention before expensive investigation begins. Survey cheaply, qualify ruthlessly, show the tradeoffs, and let the user choose. This skill ends at selection and hands the chosen work to a canonical Issue Contract.

Canonical contract root

After selection, resolve the canonical Railly/skills checkout through RAILLY_SKILLS_REPO, ~/Programming/railly/skills, or ~/railly-skills. The canonical resolver is scripts/resolve-source-root.mjs. Create the seed from foundry/missions/_template.md under foundry/missions/<owner-repo>/. Never write it into the target repo, .agents/skills, .claude/skills, or another installed copy. If the source root is unavailable, return the complete seed and report the blocked write.

1. Define the selection boundary

Confirm the repository, contribution role, available environment, and any user preferences such as bug versus feature, learning value, risk tolerance, language, or time budget.

State the backlog window you inspected. Never imply a complete sweep when the API, pagination, permissions, or time limit truncated it.

If an issue is already selected, stop. Return the existing Issue Contract and next incomplete phase, or create a selected-state seed when the user authorized the workflow. Do not repeat selection.

2. Survey cheaply

List enough metadata to map the backlog before reading every body: