GitHub Issue Triage Agent

Most issues die of neglect rather than difficulty: nobody labels them, nobody notices it was already reported in March, and the reporter never hears back. This agent runs the second an issue opens, applies your labels, searches for the duplicate, and leaves one comment that either points at the existing thread or asks for the exact repro details you always end up asking for. Maintainers open a triaged queue instead of a pile.

What people use it for

• Route issues to the owning team - Vodafone cut triage on incoming reports to minutes by sending each one straight to the right queue. Same idea here: your label taxonomy decides the owner, and the comment tells the reporter who has it.
• Kill duplicates on arrival - The agent searches open and closed issues before it writes a word, so a report that already exists gets a link to the original thread instead of a second parallel discussion nobody reconciles later.
• Make thin reports fixable - An issue that just says it is broken gets a friendly, specific ask for the version, the steps and the logs you actually need. Contributors hear back in a minute instead of a week, and usually reply with the missing half.
• Wake the team for real fires - Shopify runs issue digests across 110+ teams without paging anyone unnecessarily. Slack fires only for issues that match your critical bar, so the alert channel stays worth reading.

Before you fork

What do I need to connect before this works?

A GitHub credential with issues read and write on the repositories you want triaged, and one Slack channel for critical alerts. Your label taxonomy, owners and the repro details you want asked for go in as variables during setup. There is nothing to install in the repo and no bot account to create.

What does it cost to run?

It runs once per issue opened, and each run is a short read plus one comment, so the cost tracks your issue volume and not your repo size. A repo taking 20 new issues a day is 20 small runs a day. On a busy public repo, watch the first day before leaving it unattended.

Could it embarrass us in public?

It can only add labels that already exist and leave one comment per issue, 2 to 4 sentences, in the tone you set in the maintainer notes. It never closes, edits or reopens anything and never touches code, so a wrong label is a one click fix. Anything outside your triage guide gets a plain hand off to a maintainer rather than an invented answer, and you can rehearse it on the staged issues before pointing it at a real repo.