oh-my-issues

Turn an issue backlog into a roadmap. Issues are symptom data, not units of work — the unit of work is the architectural defect that produces them. The end state is open issues == open plans, 1:1.

Core principle

Stop closing issues one at a time. Group symptoms that share a single architectural fix into a cluster, give the cluster one canonical home (a plan-master issue + a plans/0X-*.md design doc), close every child with a standardized redirect, and ship one PR per cluster that closes all children atomically. New incoming bugs get appended to the matching master as a "Round N" comment, not opened as new tracked issues.

This compounds three ways: architectural fixes retire whole symptom families, the plan's test matrix institutionalizes prevention in CI, and standardized triage makes residual inflow cheap.

When to use

• The repo has 20+ open issues and many feel like duplicates or platform-specific symptoms of the same defect.
• The user asks to "triage", "consolidate", "cluster", "dedupe", "group", or "make a plan from" the issue list.
• A new bug is filed and the user wants to know whether it belongs to existing work.
• The user wants to ship a focused PR that resolves a cluster of related issues.

When NOT to use

• Fewer than ~15 open issues: just close them.
• Issues are genuinely independent (no shared root causes): one fix per issue is correct.
• The repo lacks plans/ discipline and the user does not want to introduce one — propose first, do not impose.

Three modes

Mode 1: Cluster pass (initial reduction)

Use when the backlog has never been consolidated. Goal: go from N issues to N_plans masters in one operation.

1. Read everything in full. Fetch every open issue's body and its comment thread — not just titles. Surface-level grouping fails without full text, and reproduction steps, linked duplicates, and diagnostic output often live in comments rather than the original body. See "GitHub CLI primitives" below for the correct paginated listing + per-issue comment fetch (a single gh issue list call does not return comment bodies).
2. Cluster by root cause, not by surface. The clustering question is would one architectural change retire all of these? — not do these mention the same word?. "Windows" is a surface; "spawn contract violated by host shells" is a root cause. Two issues with different surfaces can share a cluster (e.g. an env-var leak in two different code paths sharing one missing env-isolation boundary).
3. Name each cluster as an architectural problem. Title format: [plan-XX] <Architectural Defect> — <one-line scope>. Example: [plan-02] Spawn-Contract Templating — canonical ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} resolution across all hosts. The title must imply a fix, not a topic.
4. Open one master issue per cluster with a body that lists: the architectural defect, the children (by issue number), the fix sequence, and a required test matrix (host × IDE × shell, etc.) that prevents regression.
5. Mirror each master as plans/0X-<slug>.md in the repo. The issue is the public tracker; the doc is the design. They reference each other.
6. Close every child with the standardized redirect comment (see below) and state not planned.
7. Verify end state: gh issue list --state open returns exactly the masters and nothing else.

Target shape for ~100 issues: 4–8 masters. More than 10 means you're clustering by surface; fewer than 3 means clusters are too broad to ship as one PR each.

Mode 2: Triage (new incoming bug, steady state)

Use when a new issue is filed after consolidation is in place. Goal: never let the issue list re-accumulate.

1. Read the new issue's body in full.
2. Pattern-match the symptom against existing plan masters. For each open master, ask: would the fix described here also fix this new bug? If yes → it belongs to that plan.
3. If a match exists, post a "Round N" comment on the master that:
   • Names the new child by number
   • Describes the symptom in one line
   • Sketches the concrete fix (1–3 lines, e.g. "guard with case "$_SH" in /*.exe|"") _SH=bash ;; esac")
   • Adds any new test-matrix cell the bug exposes
4. Close the child with the standardized redirect comment, not planned.
5. If no match exists and the bug is genuinely novel: open a new plan master + plans/0X-*.md. Resist this. Most bugs are children of existing plans.

Mode 3: Bundle (ship the cluster)

…