Weekly issue triage

This run is advisory, because no workflow in this repo schedules it. Run it about once a week (a maintainer, or a coding agent with project scope). Goal: board and labels match reality, and stale or duplicate tickets get a human verification prompt instead of a silent close. It checks issues against the conventions in Issue intake and labels.

A run that changes something leaves its evidence in the tracker. Step 5 leaves a Triage comment on each stale candidate, and step 6 leaves a comment that links the canonical issue. Whatever steps 2 to 4 change shows in each issue’s history. A run that finds nothing to change doesn’t leave a trace, so in the tracker a quiet week looks the same as a skipped one.

Checklist

1. Auth: gh auth status shows project (or read:project at minimum for reads; writes need project). Switch to the owner account if needed (Auth for board writes).
2. Open vs board: list open issues and add any missing ones to org project #1, as Tracker requires (New issue intake steps 3–5). With project scope, node scripts/populate-github-project.mjs --open-only backfills in bulk.
3. Label audit: every open delivery issue has exactly one priority:* and a sensible type label. Add component or domain labels when obvious.
4. Milestone hygiene: keep only active delivery milestones open. Attach in-scope issues to the current cut.
5. Stale review: candidates are issues whose acceptance the repo already meets or whose approach was superseded, plus issues with no remaining adopter value. On each candidate, comment asking the human to verify close-without-action (Human verification comment). Do not close until they reply.
6. Duplicate review: if two issues share the same root cause, comment with the canonical issue and ask which to keep. Do not close as duplicate without confirmation (related ≠ duplicate).
7. Next work: check that the top open priority:P0 issue (or P1 when no P0 is open) matches the current milestone intent. Note it briefly for maintainers.
8. Done clutter: closed issues may linger on the board as Done. Cleanup is optional, and a green weekly run doesn’t need it.

Human verification comment (stale / close-without-action)

**Triage (YYYY-MM-DD):** Candidate to close without further action — please verify.

Evidence:

- <1–3 bullets: current docs/code that satisfy ACs, superseded approach, or no remaining value>

Options:

- Reply `close: completed` if done enough
- Reply `close: not_planned` if abandoned
- Reply `keep` + note if work remains (we will narrow acceptance criteria)

No auto-close until you confirm.

Suggested commands

# Open issues (labels + milestone)
gh issue list --repo Merlon-Docs/merlon --state open --limit 100 \
  --json number,title,labels,milestone,updatedAt

# Priority queue
gh issue list --repo Merlon-Docs/merlon --state open --label "priority:P0"
gh issue list --repo Merlon-Docs/merlon --state open --label "priority:P1"

# Issues on the current delivery milestone (replace <milestone> with its title)
gh issue list --repo Merlon-Docs/merlon --milestone "<milestone>" --state open

Compare the open-issue set to the board (Project UI filter, or GraphQL projectV2.items) and add gaps via Add an issue to the board.