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
Issue Monster - Assigns issues to Copilot agents one at a time
Mergefest - Automatically merges main branch into PR branches
Sub Issue Closer - Closes completed sub-issues automatically
Issue Template Optimizer - Improves issue templates based on usage

The Issue Arborist automatically links related issues, building a dependency tree we’d never maintain manually.

The Issue Monster became our task dispatcher for AI agents - it assigns one issue at a time to Copilot agents, preventing the chaos of parallel work on the same codebase.

Mergefest eliminates the “please merge main” dance that happens on long-lived PRs.

The Issue Template Optimizer analyzes which fields in our templates actually get filled out and suggests improvements (“nobody uses the ‘Expected behavior’ field, remove it”).

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 https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.37.7/.github/workflows/issue-arborist.md

Issue Monster:

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

Mergefest:

gh aw add https://github.com/github/gh-aw/blob/v0.37.7/.github/workflows/mergefest.md

Sub Issue Closer:

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

Issue Template Optimizer:

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

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

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.