Issues

Issues that close when the change lands

Every repository has its own tracker for problems and work to do. A change that says Closes #12 closes the issue when it's merged, and assigning an agent app hands it the issue as a task.

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One sequence

#12 names one thing

Issues and changes share a repository's numbers, so #12 is an issue or a change, never both. An issue has a title, a Markdown description, labels, up to ten assignees, people with write access or agent apps, and a conversation: comments with one level of replies, @name mentions, and each close, label and link on its timeline. Anyone signed in who can read the repository can open one and comment.

acme/invoices › Issues › #12

Slow graph view#12Open

  • The Graph tab takes a few seconds to draw on acme/invoices since the last release.
  • alice added the label performance
  • alice assigned bob
  • bob assigned the agent app release-bot

Assignees

bob

release-bot

Labels

bugperformance

Closing keywords

Merged into the default branch, it's closed

A change whose title, description or commits say Closes #12, fixes #12 or resolves #12 closes issue 12 when it's merged into the default branch, and the issue says which change closed it. Merged into another branch, it closes nothing, and the change says so. People with write access also link and unlink issues by hand, in the change's Issues box.

acme/invoices › Changes › #14

Issues this change closes or references

  • Closes#12 Slow graph view
  • References#9 Dark mode chart is blank

Merging into release/next closes nothing: only a change into main does.

#12 · alice closed this as completed: closed by change #14

Agents

Assign an agent app, and it gets a task

Assigning an agent app installed on the repository hands it a task, as Ask an agent does. Its reports show on the issue's timeline, and the change it opens is linked as closing the issue. Unassigning it cancels the task. Only a person with write access can assign an agent: agents don't hand out work.

acme/invoices › Issues › #12
  1. bob assigned the agent app release-bot
  2. bob handed release-bot task 31
  3. release-bot working Opened #14: the graph view loads its layout once
  4. release-bot linked change #14, which closes this when merged
  5. alice closed this as completed: closed by change #14

Search

Qualifiers, and plain words

The list takes qualifiers such as is:open, label:bug, assignee:@me, agent:claude-code and linked:change, and searches titles and descriptions for the other words, titles first. A bare #12 goes straight to it, and a qualifier Branchscope doesn't know is an error that names it.

acme/invoices › Issues
is:open label:bug assignee:@me sort:updatedNew issue

3 open11 closed

  • Slow graph viewbugperformance#12 · 4 comments · 1 linked change
  • Dark mode chart is blankbug#9 · 2 comments
  • Login fails on Safaribug#3 · 6 comments

People's words

Kept apart from the code graph

Issues are kept outside git, and are never part of the code graph, a review or a plan check; Branchscope sends no issue text to a model. Agents read and write them over MCP with list_issues, get_issue and open_issue, writing only with the issues:write scope. If your organization uses Linear, changes keep linking its issues beside these, or you can turn Issues off for a repository.

claude-code › branchscope (MCP)
$ list_issues { repo: "acme/invoices", query: "is:open label:bug" }
2 open issues, 9 closed match.
#12 Slow graph view (open; bug, performance; assigned to bob, agent/release-bot; by alice)
#9 Dark mode chart is blank (open; bug; by carol via claude-code)
$ open_issue { repo: "acme/invoices", title: "CSV export drops the currency column" }
Opened #15: CSV export drops the currency column

Open your first issue

Open a repository's Issues tab, choose New issue, and create the default labels on the Labels page.

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