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Issue triage done before standup

New issues arrive labeled, deduplicated, and prioritized every weekday morning, so maintainers start from a clean queue instead of a backlog.

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The problem

Issues arrive around the clock and sit unlabeled until someone volunteers. Duplicates accumulate, reports missing reproduction steps go stale, and the tracker slowly stops being a place anyone trusts.

Today’s workaround

A rotating triage duty that slips whenever the assigned person has a deadline, or a weekly cleanup session that spends senior engineering time on labeling.

The outcome

Every weekday before standup: new issues labeled and prioritized with a one-line justification, duplicates linked to their originals, and a drafted first response for anything missing reproduction steps.

How the routine works

The GitHub issue triage template runs each weekday morning. It reads issues opened or updated since the last run, identifies duplicates with links to the original, proposes a label and priority with a one-line justification, and drafts a first response for reports that are missing reproduction steps. In propose-only mode the result is a digest a maintainer applies in a few minutes; with the labeling and commenting tools explicitly approved, the routine applies its own proposals and the digest becomes a record.

The companion stale pull request review runs weekly, catching the other half of tracker rot: finished work dying in review. It names what each quiet pull request is waiting on and who owns the block.

Setting it up

Connect GitHub, choose the template, and run it once against a busy week of issues. If your team uses Linear for planning, connect it over MCP and the routine can propose tracker updates through whatever tools you approve. Prove the run, then set the schedule to weekday mornings in your timezone. Both templates live on the engineering category page.

Prove it on your own data.

Adapt the template, approve its exact permissions, and read the first run’s trace before any schedule takes over.

Put your first routine to work