Conciseness

The body is lean and assumes Claude's competence with git/gh/pnpm, spending its tokens only on non-obvious repo knowledge (the build-all exception, `-x` for provenance, the LTS branch selection policy, empty-cherry-pick handling); no sections explain concepts Claude already knows, fitting the 'every token earns its place' anchor.

Actionability

Steps 1–5, 7, and the PR templates are copy-paste ready with clearly marked placeholders (<pr-number>, <target-branch>), but step 6's verification guidance ("the relevant integration test mode for behavior changes") leaves the actual Next.js test commands unspecified — a minor gap consistent with the score-4 anchor rather than full coverage of the common cases.

Workflow Clarity

Seven clearly sequenced steps include explicit validation checkpoints — pre-flight `git status`/branch inspection, cross-checking mergeCommit against `git log --grep` with subject verification, a conflict-resolution policy, an empty-cherry-pick feedback loop (verify already-present and report instead of duplicating), and a dedicated verification step — matching the score-5 anchor with error-recovery loops.

Progressive Disclosure

No bundle files exist (references/, scripts/, assets/ are absent) and none are needed: this single-purpose skill is well organized into Inputs / Workflow / PR Shape / Related Skills sections, with clearly signaled one-level pointers to related skills ($create-pr, $pr-status-triage) and no content wrongly inlined.

Specificity

The description enumerates five concrete actions — "finding the merged PR commit", "creating a backport branch from the target release branch", "cherry-picking from canary", "validating", and "opening the PR with the release branch as the base" — giving comprehensive coverage of the workflow, matching the score-5 anchor rather than the score-4 anchor, which allows for coverage gaps.

Completeness

It explicitly answers 'what' ("Covers finding the merged PR commit, creating a backport branch... cherry-picking from canary, validating, and opening the PR") and 'when' ("Use when the user asks to backport, cherry-pick, or open a backport PR from a PR number to an older Next.js version") with concrete trigger phrases, matching the score-5 anchor exactly.

Trigger Term Quality

"Use when the user asks to backport, cherry-pick, or open a backport PR from a PR number" supplies the natural phrases a user would say, but variants like "back-port" or "apply a fix to the release branch" are absent, fitting the 'good keyword coverage; a few natural terms missing' anchor rather than comprehensive synonym coverage.

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

It carves out a clear niche — backporting merged Next.js PRs from canary to named LTS branches (releases/lts/active, releases/lts/maintenance) — with triggers unlikely to fire for generic PR-creation or cherry-pick help, so conflict risk is minimal.