manage

Manage

Modifies existing issues — edit, close, reopen, delete, batch operations, and label management.

For creating new issues, use /github-issues:create.

Critical Rules

• Read cross-cutting behaviors first: skills/shared/references/cross-cutting.md
• Always add a comment when making significant changes (labels, milestone, assignee)
• Always preview before making major edits
• NEVER create priority labels — see skills/shared/references/label-taxonomy.md
• Use --json flags for structured output

Prerequisites Check

gh auth status

Review Before Modifying

Before executing any issue edit (title, body, labels, assignee, milestone), delegate to the issue-reviewer agent to validate the proposed changes. Present the review results to the user. If the review fails, fix the issues before proceeding.

Capabilities

1. Edit Issue

Modify issue properties with context.

# Edit title
gh issue edit NUMBER --title "New title"

# Edit body
gh issue edit NUMBER --body "New body"

# Add labels
gh issue edit NUMBER --add-label "bug"

# Remove labels
gh issue edit NUMBER --remove-label "chore"

# Set assignee
gh issue edit NUMBER --add-assignee USERNAME

# Remove assignee
gh issue edit NUMBER --remove-assignee USERNAME

# Set milestone
gh issue edit NUMBER --milestone "v2.0"

Always add a comment explaining the change:

gh issue comment NUMBER --body "Updated labels: added \`bug\` — this is a defect in existing behavior, not a missing feature."

3. Close Issue

Workflow:

1. View the issue — understand what's being closed
2. Check for dependents — search for issues referencing this one:

   gh issue list --search "#NUMBER" --state open --json number,title
   

3. Close with reason:

   # Completed
   gh issue close NUMBER --reason completed --comment "Resolved by #PR or description of resolution"
   
   # Not planned
   gh issue close NUMBER --reason "not planned" --comment "Reason for not proceeding"
   

4. Notify dependents — if other issues reference this one, comment on them:

   gh issue comment DEPENDENT_NUMBER --body "Note: #NUMBER has been closed. Impact on this issue: ..."
   

4. Reopen Issue

gh issue reopen NUMBER --comment "Reopening — the fix in #PR did not fully resolve the problem. See reproduction steps: ..."

5. Delete Issue

Use with extreme caution. Deletion is irreversible.

# Always warn the user first
gh issue delete NUMBER --yes

Only proceed after explicit user confirmation. Suggest closing instead of deleting in most cases.

6. Batch Operations

For operations across multiple issues, read references/batch-operations.md for safety rules and patterns.

Common batch operations:

• Apply a label to multiple issues
• Close multiple resolved issues
• Assign a set of issues to someone

7. Label Management

List existing labels:

gh label list --json name,color,description --limit 100

Create a label (following taxonomy in skills/shared/references/label-taxonomy.md):

gh label create "LABEL_NAME" --color "HEX" --description "Description"

Edit a label:

gh label edit "OLD_NAME" --name "NEW_NAME" --color "HEX" --description "Description"

Delete a label:

gh label delete "LABEL_NAME" --yes

Rules:

• Always check existing labels before creating
• Follow the naming convention: lowercase, kebab-case, no prefixes
• NEVER create priority labels — this is an absolute rule
• NEVER create status labels — no workflow-state labels
• NEVER use prefixes — no type:, status:, area: patterns

Troubleshooting

Issue creation fails:

• Verify the repo has issues enabled: gh repo view --json hasIssuesEnabled
• Check that labels exist before referencing them in create

Permission denied on edit:

• The user may not have write access to the repo. Check with gh repo view --json viewerPermission

Milestone not found:

• List available milestones: gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/milestones --jq '.[].title'