Issue Create Skill

Create well-formatted GitHub issues with intelligent automation including AI-powered label suggestions, content type detection, template formatting, and related issue linking.

Self-Evolving Skill: This skill improves through use. If instructions are wrong, parameters drifted, or a workaround was needed — fix this file immediately, don't defer. Only update for real, reproducible issues.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Creating bug reports, feature requests, questions, or documentation issues
• Need AI-powered label suggestions from repository's existing taxonomy
• Want automatic duplicate detection and related issue linking
• Need consistent issue formatting across different repositories

Invocation

Slash command: /gh-tools:issue-create

Natural language triggers:

• "Create an issue about..."
• "File a bug for..."
• "Submit a feature request..."
• "Report this problem to..."
• "Post an issue on GitHub..."

Features

1. Repository Detection

• Auto-detects repository from current git directory
• Supports explicit --repo owner/repo flag
• Checks permissions before attempting to create

2. Content Type Detection

• AI-powered detection (gpt-4.1 via gh-models)
• Fallback to keyword matching
• Types: Bug, Feature, Question, Documentation

3. Title Extraction

• Extracts informative title from content
• Adds type prefix (Bug:, Feature:, etc.)
• Maximizes GitHub's 256-character limit for informative titles

4. Body Limit Maximization (65,536 Characters)

GitHub issue bodies support 65,536 characters (not bytes — UTF-8 multibyte characters count as 1). Always aim to fill a single post rather than splitting across multiple issues or comments.

Principle: One comprehensive post is more valuable than many fragmented ones. Pack as much analysis, context, history, and multi-perspective reasoning as possible into a single issue body or comment.

When composing long-form issue content:

• Check remaining capacity: echo "$BODY" | wc -m (characters, not bytes)
• Target ~60,000 chars to leave headroom for GFM rendering edge cases
• Use collapsible sections (<details><summary>) for dense reference material — they don't reduce the char budget but improve readability
• Include all perspectives: if the issue documents a decision, include the alternatives considered, trade-offs, evidence for/against, and why the chosen path won
• Embed historical context: timelines, prior art, links to related issues, session provenance — all belong in one post
• Never pre-emptively split: only split if you genuinely exceed 65,536 chars (rare)

Pre-post size check pattern:

# Build body, then verify it fits
BODY=$(cat <<'EOF'
... your content ...
EOF
)
CHARS=$(echo "$BODY" | wc -m | tr -d ' ')
echo "Body size: ${CHARS}/65536 chars"
if [ "$CHARS" -gt 65536 ]; then
  echo "WARNING: Exceeds limit by $((CHARS - 65536)) chars — trim or split"
fi

5. Template Formatting

• Auto-selects template based on content type
• Bug: Steps to reproduce, Expected/Actual behavior
• Feature: Use case, Proposed solution
• Question: Context, What was tried
• Documentation: Location, Suggested change

5. Label Suggestion

• Fetches repository's existing labels
• AI suggests 2-4 relevant labels
• Only suggests labels that exist (taxonomy-aware)
• 24-hour cache for performance

6. Related Issues

• Searches for similar issues
• Links related issues in body
• Warns about potential duplicates

7. Preview & Confirm

• Full preview before creation
• Dry-run mode available
• Edit option for modifications

Usage Examples

Basic Usage

# From within a git repository
bun ~/eon/cc-skills/plugins/gh-tools/scripts/issue-create.ts \
  --body "Login page crashes when using special characters in password"

With Explicit Repository

bun ~/eon/cc-skills/plugins/gh-tools/scripts/issue-create.ts \
  --repo owner/repo \
  --body "Feature: Add dark mode support for better accessibility"

Dry Run (Preview Only)

bun ~/eon/cc-skills/plugins/gh-tools/scripts/issue-create.ts \
  --repo owner/repo \
  --body "Bug: API returns 500 error" \
  --dry-run

With Custom Title and Labels

bun ~/eon/cc-skills/plugins/gh-tools/scripts/issue-create.ts \
  --repo owner/repo \
  --title "Bug: Login fails with OAuth" \
  --body "Detailed description..." \
  --labels "bug,authentication"

Disable AI Features

bun ~/eon/cc-skills/plugins/gh-tools/scripts/issue-create.ts \
  --body "Question: How to configure..." \
  --no-ai

CLI Options

Dependencies

• gh CLI (required) - GitHub CLI tool
• gh-models extension (optional) - Enables AI features

Installing gh-models

gh extension install github/gh-models

Permission Handling

Logging

Logs to: ~/.claude/logs/gh-issue-create.jsonl

Events logged:

• preflight - Initial checks
• type_detected - Content type detection
• labels_suggested - Label suggestions
• related_found - Related issues search
• issue_created - Successful creation
• dry_run - Dry run completion

Related Documentation

• Content Types Reference
• Label Strategy Reference
• AI Prompts Reference

Embedding Images in Issues

GitHub Issues have no API for programmatic image upload. The web UI's drag-and-drop uses an internal S3 policy flow that is intentionally not exposed to API clients (cli/cli#1895).

Preflight: Ensure Images Are Reachable

The ?raw=true URL resolves via github.com — if the image doesn't exist at that path on the remote, it silently 404s (broken image, no error). Run this preflight before creating the issue:

# 1. Detect repo context
OWNER_REPO=$(gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q '.nameWithOwner')
BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
VISIBILITY=$(gh repo view --json visibility -q '.visibility')

# 2. Verify images are git-tracked (not gitignored)
IMG_DIR="path/to/images"
for f in ${IMG_DIR}/*.png; do
  git ls-files --error-unmatch "$f" >/dev/null 2>&1 \
    || echo "WARNING: $f is NOT tracked by git (check .gitignore)"
done

# 3. Verify images are committed (not just staged or untracked)
UNCOMMITTED=$(git diff --name-only HEAD -- "${IMG_DIR}/" 2>/dev/null)
UNTRACKED=$(git ls-files --others --exclude-standard -- "${IMG_DIR}/" 2>/dev/null)
if [[ -n "$UNCOMMITTED" || -n "$UNTRACKED" ]]; then
  echo "FAIL: Images not committed — commit and push first"
  echo "  Uncommitted: ${UNCOMMITTED}"
  echo "  Untracked:   ${UNTRACKED}"
  exit 1
fi

# 4. Verify commit is pushed to remote (local commits invisible to github.com)
LOCAL_SHA=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
REMOTE_SHA=$(git rev-parse "origin/${BRANCH}" 2>/dev/null)
if [[ "$LOCAL_SHA" != "$REMOTE_SHA" ]]; then
  echo "FAIL: Local commits not pushed — run: git push origin ${BRANCH}"
  exit 1
fi

# 5. Build image base URL
IMG_BASE="https://github.com/${OWNER_REPO}/blob/${BRANCH}/${IMG_DIR}"
echo "Image base URL: ${IMG_BASE}/<filename>.png?raw=true"
echo "Repo visibility: ${VISIBILITY}"
if [[ "$VISIBILITY" == "PRIVATE" ]]; then
  echo "NOTE: Images only visible to authenticated collaborators"
fi

Preflight checklist (what each step catches):

URL Format: ?raw=true vs raw.githubusercontent.com

For images already committed and pushed, use github.com/blob/...?raw=true URLs — not raw.githubusercontent.com:

<!-- BROKEN for private repos (no browser cookies on raw.githubusercontent.com) -->

![img](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owner/repo/main/path/image.png)

<!-- WORKING for all repos (browser has cookies on github.com, gets signed redirect) -->

![img](https://github.com/owner/repo/blob/main/path/image.png?raw=true)

Scripting pattern (batch images → issue body):

IMG_BASE="https://github.com/${OWNER_REPO}/blob/${BRANCH}/${IMG_DIR}"

gh issue create --title "Feedback with screenshots" --body "$(cat <<EOF
## Item 1
![description](${IMG_BASE}/01-screenshot.png?raw=true)

## Item 2
![description](${IMG_BASE}/02-screenshot.png?raw=true)
EOF
)"

See AP-07 in GFM Anti-Patterns for the full technical explanation.

Images NOT in the Repository

For images only on disk (not committed), four options:

Playwright Automation (Programmatic CDN Upload)

GitHub has no API for image uploads, but the browser's file-attachment flow can be automated via Playwright to get permanent user-attachments CDN URLs without any commit/push preflight.

Browser routes in general: chrome-profiles.

How it works:

1. scripts/gh-issue-image-upload.ts opens the issue page in Playwright's Chromium with a persistent profile (~/.local/share/gh-issue-image-upload/profile, override GH_ISSUE_IMAGE_PROFILE). Run it with bun "$(cc-plugin-root gh-tools)/skills/issue-create/scripts/gh-issue-image-upload.ts" <issue-url> <image>...
2. First run only: user logs in to GitHub (any method — Google SSO, passkey, password). Cookies persist.
3. Script clicks "Paste, drop, or click to add files" → intercepts the file chooser → sets the image file
4. GitHub uploads to its S3 backend and inserts an <img> tag with a user-attachments CDN URL into the comment textarea
5. Script extracts the CDN URL and clears the textarea (no comment is actually posted)

Key implementation details (GitHub's 2026 React comment composer):

• Comment textarea selector: textarea[placeholder="Use Markdown to format your comment"] (dynamic React IDs — do NOT match by id)
• File upload trigger: click the "Paste, drop, or click to add files" text, then intercept page.waitForEvent("filechooser")
• Upload result format: <img width="W" height="H" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/UUID" /> (HTML <img> tag, not ![](...) markdown)
• Old textarea#new_comment_field and file-attachment input[type='file'] selectors no longer exist
• Batch uploads: clear textarea between uploads with textarea.fill("")

Browser route: this is rung 2 of the chrome-profiles ladder (Playwright's own Chromium, signed in once), which keeps it independent of your everyday Chrome. If GitHub is already signed in to an everyday profile, that plugin's setup <email> can drive it instead; the debug-port and Chrome-136 mechanics are documented there, not here.

Troubleshooting

"No repository context"

Run from a git directory or use --repo owner/repo flag.

Labels not suggested

• Check if gh-models is installed: gh extension list
• Verify repository has labels: gh label list --repo owner/repo
• Check label cache: ls ~/.cache/gh-issue-skill/labels/

AI features not working

Install gh-models extension:

gh extension install github/gh-models

Post-Execution Reflection

After this skill completes, check before closing:

1. Did the command succeed? — If not, fix the instruction or error table that caused the failure.
2. Did parameters or output change? — If the underlying tool's interface drifted, update Usage examples and Parameters table to match.
3. Was a workaround needed? — If you had to improvise (different flags, extra steps), update this SKILL.md so the next invocation doesn't need the same workaround.

Only update if the issue is real and reproducible — not speculative.