Improve issue triage template with structured triage flow

[labudis]

Summary

Improves the issue triage workflow template by incorporating patterns from the GitHub Issues triage agent and iterating based on live testing.

Changes

New safe outputs:

• set-issue-type for issue type assignment
• close-issue with state-reason: "not_planned" to auto-close spam
• labels toolset for richer label metadata (replaces gh label list bash)

Restructured flow (was 8 overlapping steps, now 4 clear phases):

1. Gather context
2. Spam and quality check
3. Triage (type, labels, duplicates, coding agent suitability)
4. Apply results

New capabilities:

• Auto-close spam issues as "not planned" with invalid/spam label
• Quality gate for incomplete issues (asks author for specifics, applies needs-info label)
• Issue type assignment (respects existing values)
• Duplicate detection with confidence levels (duplicate vs related, up to 3 each)
• Coding agent suitability assessment (Suitable / Needs more info / Not suitable)
• Structured triage report with assessment table

Guardrails:

• Do not overwrite existing issue type
• Do not invent missing context or make assumptions
• Label safety warning (labels can trigger automation)
• Under-label rather than speculatively add labels
• Comments addressed to maintainers, not issue authors

Preserved from original:

• Web search for docs, error messages, known solutions
• Debugging strategies and reproduction steps
• Sub-task breakdown with checklists
• Collapsed sections for tidy comments

Testing

Tested with 13 issues across 3 rounds in a private test repository. All runs completed successfully.

Round 1

Test case	Result
Feature request (Slack notifications)	✅ Type: Feature, found 2 related issues, implementation checklist
Near-duplicate of existing issue (scroll position)	✅ Flagged original as duplicate, found related issue, recommended closing

Round 2

Test case	Result
Spam (bitcoin scam)	✅ One-sentence callout, no metadata applied, exited early
Vague/incomplete (no details)	✅ Asked author for specifics, refused to triage
Epic (multi-repo dashboard)	✅ Type: Feature, correct labels, found 3 related issues, phased sub-tasks
Bug (duplicate weekly status issues)	✅ Type: Bug, correct labels, root cause hypothesis, 3 fix approaches
Feature request (file path labeling)	✅ Type: Feature, correct label, implementation approach, subtask checklist

Improvements made from testing

• Round 1: Agent detected duplicate but did not apply duplicate label; added explicit instruction
• Round 1: Removed set-issue-field (compiler does not support it yet)
• Round 2: Spam issue left open; added close-issue safe output
• Round 2: Added invalid/spam label for spam, needs-info label for incomplete issues
• Round 2: Added coding agent suitability assessment
• Round 2: Replaced gh label list bash with labels toolset

Round 3

Tested in github/triage-agent (different repo with richer label set).

Test case	Result
Spam (V-Bucks scam)	✅ Closed as not planned, invalid label applied
Vague bug ("doesn't work")	✅ question label, asked for specifics, refused to triage
Well-written bug (label mismatch from code blocks)	✅ Type: Bug, labels: bug + accuracy + triage agent, coding agent: Suitable, found related issue
Feature request (custom triage rules)	✅ Type: Feature, no labels (correct; none fit), found 2 related issues
Accuracy bug (non-English issues)	✅ Type: Bug, labels: accuracy + triage agent, coding agent: Needs more info

Issue found and fixed:

• Spam issues got two comments (triage report + "Closing as spam"); fixed to post a single close comment with no assessment table

[labudis]

Gap: set-issue-field safe output not working

The safe outputs reference documents set-issue-field with full configuration options (max, target, allowed-fields, target-repo, etc.), but the compiler (v0.72.1) rejects it:

Error: Invalid safe output: set-issue-field

This means the triage workflow cannot set issue fields like Priority, Iteration, or custom fields today. This is a significant gap for triage use cases, since field assignment is one of the most common triage actions.

Once this lands in the compiler, this template should add:

safe-outputs:
  set-issue-field:
    target: "triggering"
    allowed-fields: [Priority, Iteration]

And Step 3 should be updated to instruct the agent to set priority and other fields.

cc @pelikhan