🌊 Turn raw notes into a prioritized backlog

Styx Flow is a Claude Code skill that takes your unfiltered notes, cross-checks with existing TODOs and shapes them into a clean, sorted backlog document with summaries, reasoning for prioritization and easy to read tagging.

• P0: Hard blockers for development or users
• P1: Serious bug or big easy win
• P2: Must ship before next release
• P3: Should fix, won't block the release
• P4: Nice to have / parking lot

Large-scope items — XL effort, broad system footprint, or unknown architecture — are automatically flagged as Epics and routed to a separate EPICS.md file so they don't clutter the sprint backlog.

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⚡ Claude Code - Skill

Styx Flow lives natively inside Claude Code as a /styx skill. No API keys, no config per project. Install once, invoke from any session.

Usage

Type /styx in any Claude Code session, provide raw text input or link files.

1. Read your project's CLAUDE.md if present (instant context)
2. Auto-read TODOs.md if it exists, carrying forward and re-sorting existing items
3. Ask for any new notes to add, paste directly or point to a file
4. Parse, classify, refine, score, and sort everything (existing + new)
5. Write the full result back to TODOs.md and display it inline

TODOs.md is the living backlog. Commit it, share it, track it in git like any other project file.

Epics

Items that are too large for a sprint — XL effort plus broad scope or an unknown design path — are automatically classified as Epics and written to EPICS.md instead of TODOs.md.

EPICS.md uses the same P1–P4 structure as TODOs.md, but with a shifted meaning: P1 = ready to implement, P2 = design session is next, P3 = long-term vision, P4 = speculative. Every /styx run reads and re-sorts both files together.

The threshold is intentionally relaxed: meeting any two of the three signals (XL effort, 3+ systems in scope, unknown design path) is enough to qualify.

History

Every /styx run also saves a timestamped record to .styx/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM-slug.md: source notes + full output.

The skill adds .styx/ to your .gitignore automatically on first use, so session history stays local.

Tweaking

The output template and scoring rules live in your home directory. Changes take effect immediately.

File	Purpose
~/.claude/styx/papyrus.md	Output document structure: rename tiers, add fields, change format
~/.claude/styx/manifesto.md	Prioritization philosophy: scoring rubric, triage rules

Scoring

Each item gets two scores alongside its priority:

Field	Scale	Notes
Effort	XS / S / M / L / XL	Calibrated assuming Claude Code assistance
Gain	XS / S / M / L / XL	XS = negligible, XL = transformative

Effort and gain feed directly into priority: a high-gain, low-effort item rises fast; a vague, expensive idea parks at P4.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/your-repo/styx-flow.git
cd styx-flow
./install-skill.sh

Then restart Claude Code.

Updating

git pull && ./install-skill.sh

And restart Claude Code.

🔗 Related

• 🔥 Hades Gate - Claude Skill: Turn feature drafts into a deep orthogonal analysis (/hades)