Meet the Workflows: Issue Triage

Jan 13, 2026

Don Syme

Peli de Halleux

Mara Kiefer

Welcome back to Peli’s Agent Factory!

We’re the GitHub Next team. Over the past months, we’ve built and operated a collection of automated agentic workflows. These aren’t just demos - these are real agents doing actual work in our github/gh-aw repository and others.

Think of this as your guided tour through our agent factory. We’re showcasing the workflows that caught our attention. Every workflow links to its source markdown file, so you can peek under the hood and see exactly how it works.

Starting Simple: Automated Issue Triage

To start the tour, let’s begin with one of the simpler workflows that handles incoming activity - issue triage.

Issue triage represents a “hello world” of automated agentic workflows: practical, immediately useful, relatively simple, and impactful. It’s used as the starter example in other agentic automation technologies like Claude Code in GitHub Actions.

When a new issue is opened, the triage agent analyzes its content, does research in the codebase and other issues, responds with a comment, and applies appropriate labels based on predefined categories. This helps maintainers quickly understand the nature of incoming issues without manual review.

Let’s take a look at the full Issue Triage Agent:

---
timeout-minutes: 5

on:
  issue:
    types: [opened, reopened]

permissions:
  issues: read

tools:
  github:
    toolsets: [issues, labels]

safe-outputs:
  add-labels:
    allowed: [bug, feature, enhancement, documentation, question, help-wanted, good-first-issue]
  add-comment: {}
---

# Issue Triage Agent

List open issues in ${{ github.repository }} that have no labels. For each
unlabeled issue, analyze the title and body, then add one of the allowed
labels: `bug`, `feature`, `enhancement`, `documentation`, `question`,
`help-wanted`, or `good-first-issue`.

Skip issues that:
- Already have any of these labels
- Have been assigned to any user (especially non-bot users)

Do research on the issue in the context of the codebase and, after
adding the label to an issue, mention the issue author in a comment, explain
why the label was added and give a brief summary of how the issue may be
addressed.

Note how concise this is - it’s like reading a to-do list for the agent. The workflow runs whenever a new issue is opened or reopened. It checks for unlabeled issues, analyzes their content, and applies appropriate labels based on content analysis. It even leaves a friendly comment explaining the label choice.

In the frontmatter, we define permissions, tools, and safe outputs. This ensures the agent only has access to what it needs and can’t perform any unsafe actions. The natural language instructions in the body guide the agent’s behavior in a clear, human-readable way.

We’ve deliberately kept this workflow ultra-simple. In practice, in your own repo, customization is key. Triage differs in every repository. Tailoring workflows to your specific context will make them more effective. Generic agents are okay, but customized ones are often a better fit.

Using These Workflows

You can add this workflow to your own repository and remix it as follows:

Issue Triage Agent:

gh aw add https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.37.7/.github/workflows/issue-triage-agent.md

Then edit and remix the workflow specification to meet your needs, recompile using gh aw compile, and push to your repository. See our Quick Start for further installation and setup instructions.

Next Up: Code Quality & Refactoring Workflows

Now that we’ve explored how triage workflows help us stay on top of incoming activity, let’s turn to something far more radical and powerful: agents that continuously improve code.

Continue reading: Continuous Simplicity →

Learn More

GitHub Agentic Workflows - The technology behind the workflows
Quick Start - How to write and compile workflows

This is part 1 of a 19-part series exploring the workflows in Peli’s Agent Factory.