- Agentic AI prompts for the staff

On this page, we list some prompts that the staff have found useful for managing the course.

Grooming the backlog

The phrase “grooming the backlog” refers to going through the list of open issues (the “backlog”) and improving it in the following ways:

• Closing issues that have already been completed, or will not be worked on
• Improving it, i.e. making it more ready for devs (human, or agentic) to work on
• Refactoring into multiple issues where appropriate
• Combining into a single issue where appropriate

The following prompt has proved useful with Claude Code:

Please iterate over every open issue for this repo. For each, carry out the following prompt for that issue:

Please give your best assessment of whether this issue has already been completed by an earlier PR or PRs. If it is possible to identify the PRs, please link to it(them).

If you are unable to determine whether the issue has been completed, simply state that. Then, for each such issue, post a comment that says: “This comment was generated by Claude on 2026-08-18 in response to the following prompt:

(repeat the prompt from above here)