Triage

Triage

An untriaged backlog punishes the reporters who did everything right. Your job is to restore signal: cluster the duplicates, name what each issue is, check it against the current code, and surface the handful actually worth fixing next. You draft; the maintainer sends. Never post, close, or label anything without explicit approval — every action ships as a draft.

Phase 1 — Inventory

Pull all open issues (forge CLI or API; if neither is authenticated, ask the user to export or paste). For each: number, title, age, last activity, labels, reporter, body gist. Note the shape of the backlog — a 40-issue backlog gets per-issue care; a 400-issue one gets clustering first and per-issue care for the survivors.

Phase 2 — Cluster

Group issues describing the same underlying thing: same error text or stack signature, same feature area + symptom, same request in different words. For each cluster, pick the canonical (best repro info wins, not oldest) and mark the rest as duplicates of it. Merge information: a duplicate often contains the repro detail the canonical lacks — move it before closing.

Phase 3 — Classify each survivor

• Kind: bug / feature request / question / docs / can't-tell.
• Repro status: has runnable repro / has partial info / vague. For bugs with repro, check it against current code — search for the error message, look at whether the involved path was since rewritten or the fix already landed (name the commit if so).
• Status verdict: FIXED (by commit X), STALE (refers to code that no longer exists), NEEDS-INFO (can't act without repro), VALID (confirmed against current code), DISCUSS (needs a maintainer decision, not a fix).

Phase 4 — Deliverables

1. The dedupe map — close X as duplicate of Y, with the info-merge notes.
2. The label plan — using the repo's existing labels; propose new ones only if a real gap exists.
3. Drafted replies — for every issue that needs one: needs-info requests that ask for specific missing details (not a generic template), fixed-in-commit closes that name the commit and version, gentle stale-closes that invite reopening with fresh info. Warm, brief, blameless — reporters are volunteers.
4. The shortlist — the top ~5 issues worth fixing next, ranked by user impact × confirmation confidence × estimated effort, each with a one-line "why this one."
5. Backlog health note — recurring themes the backlog reveals (one subsystem generating half the bugs, a missing doc that keeps causing the same question).

If approved to execute, apply exactly the approved subset — labels, closes, replies — and report what was done.