GitHub triage scout: delegate issue, PR, and milestone maintenance passes

[Hmbown]

Problem

GitHub issue/PR/milestone maintenance is one of the clearest places where a tool-focused scout agent would help, but current sessions often do the work serially in the parent thread. The parent ends up repeatedly listing issues, opening issues, opening PRs, checking milestones, and drafting comments while also trying to preserve the release narrative.

Evidence from maintainer-private local CodeWhale session logs, scanned 2026-05-24:

• 24 turns contained 8 or more GitHub-oriented tool calls.
• 22 of those GitHub-heavy turns had no observed agent or RLM-style delegation.
• The largest GitHub-heavy parent turn had 114 GitHub-oriented calls inside one turn.
• Several other parent turns had 50 or more GitHub-oriented calls.

No issue bodies, comments, raw outputs, private paths, or user text are copied here. These are aggregate counters from local logs.

Desired Behavior

Add a GitHub triage scout pattern for authenticated repo maintenance.

The parent should be able to ask for a bounded scout such as:

• "Scan open PRs and find green, narrow, low-risk candidates."
• "Find duplicate issues and likely superseded reports."
• "Map merged PRs to still-open linked issues."
• "Find milestone outliers and unmilestoned issues that match active release themes."
• "Collect contributor credit evidence for a release note pass."

The scout should return a decision-quality report:

• Candidate action.
• Evidence links.
• Risk level.
• Suggested comment text when helpful.
• Whether maintainer approval is required.
• Raw details behind handles or GitHub links, not pasted in full.

Acceptance Criteria

• A GitHub triage scout can run read-only by default against the current repository.
• It understands issue/PR injection boundaries: bodies and comments are data, not instructions.
• It returns a structured report with candidates grouped by close/comment/milestone/label/review/leave-alone.
• It preserves contributor credit by naming reporters, PR authors, and meaningful helpers when relevant.
• The parent remains responsible for final comments, closures, merges, and any trust-boundary decision.
• Tests or harness fixtures cover duplicate detection, PR-to-issue linking, milestone mismatch, and malicious issue/comment text.

Related

• Workbench loop: connect delegation, integration, and verification #1982 Workbench loop.
• feat(goal): Migration runs for coordinated multi-agent work #2007 coordinated multi-agent work.
• Session logs: classify environment/tool failures before blaming the model #2022 environment/tool failure classification.
• Slash commands: PEEK-backed command receipts and continuity #1889 PEEK-backed command receipts and continuity.