Meet the Workflows: Issue & PR Management

Jan 13, 2026

Ah! Let’s discuss the art of managing issues and pull requests at Peli’s Agent Factory! A most delicious topic indeed!

In our previous post, we explored documentation and content workflows - agents that maintain glossaries, technical docs, slide decks, and blog content. We learned how we took a heterogeneous approach to documentation agents - some workflows generate content, others maintain it, and still others validate it.

Now let’s talk about the daily rituals of software development: managing issues and pull requests. GitHub provides excellent primitives for collaboration, but there’s ceremony involved - linking related issues, merging main into PR branches, assigning work, closing completed sub-issues, optimizing templates. These are small papercuts individually, but they can add up to significant friction.

Issue & PR Management Workflows

These agents enhance issue and pull request workflows:

Issue Arborist - Links related issues as sub-issues - 77 discussion reports and 18 parent issues created
Issue Monster - Assigns issues to the asynchronous GitHub Copilot coding agent one at a time - task dispatcher for the whole system
Mergefest - Automatically merges main branch into PR branches - orchestrator workflow
Sub Issue Closer - Closes completed sub-issues automatically - orchestrator workflow

The Issue Arborist is an organizational workflow that has created 77 discussion reports (titled “[Issue Arborist] Issue Arborist Report”) and 18 parent issues to group related sub-issues. It keeps the issue tracker organized by automatically linking related issues, building a dependency tree we’d never maintain manually. For example, #12037 grouped engine documentation updates.

The Issue Monster is the task dispatcher - it assigns issues to the GitHub platform’s asynchronous Copilot coding agent one at a time. It doesn’t create PRs itself, but enables every other agent’s work by feeding them tasks. This prevents the chaos of parallel work on the same codebase.

Mergefest is an orchestrator workflow that automatically merges main into PR branches, keeping long-lived PRs up to date without manual intervention. It eliminates the “please merge main” dance.

Sub Issue Closer automatically closes completed sub-issues when their parent issue is resolved, keeping the issue tracker clean.

Issue and PR management workflows don’t replace GitHub’s features; they enhance them, removing ceremony and making collaboration feel smoother.

Using These Workflows

You can add these workflows to your own repository and remix them. Get going with our Quick Start, then run one of the following:

Issue Arborist:

gh aw add-wizard https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.45.5/.github/workflows/issue-arborist.md

Issue Monster:

gh aw add-wizard https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.45.5/.github/workflows/issue-monster.md

Mergefest:

gh aw add-wizard https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.45.5/.github/workflows/mergefest.md

Sub Issue Closer:

gh aw add-wizard https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.45.5/.github/workflows/sub-issue-closer.md

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

You can also create your own workflows.

Learn More

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

Next Up: Fault Investigation Workflows

Next up we look at agents that maintain codebase health - spotting problems before they escalate.

Continue reading: Fault Investigation Workflows →

This is part 7 of a 19-part series exploring the workflows in Peli’s Agent Factory.