Stale Issues Investigator¶

Find open issues that appear to already be resolved, label them as stale, and file a report.

Workflow source: gh-aw-stale-issues-investigator.md

How it works¶

The agent investigates open issues for evidence of resolution (linked PRs, code evidence, conversation consensus). Newly identified candidates are labeled with the configured stale label and included in a summary report issue.

Investigation strategy¶

A prescan step fetches up to 500 open issues (sorted by least recently updated) into a local index file before the agent starts, giving it an immediate view of the most likely stale candidates. The agent then starts with high-signal candidates (linked PRs, resolution language in comments, and long-stale updates) and includes coverage stats in no-op runs (total open issues, candidate count, analyzed count).

Quick Install¶

mkdir -p .github/workflows && curl -sL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/ai-github-actions/v0/gh-agent-workflows/stale-issues-investigator/example.yml \
  -o .github/workflows/stale-issues-investigator.yml

Agentic Maintenance Required¶

This workflow emits expiring safe-outputs and needs the agentics-maintenance workflow to close expired reports. Install it once per repo:

mkdir -p .github/workflows && curl -sL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/ai-github-actions/v0/.github/workflows/agentics-maintenance.yml \
  -o .github/workflows/agentics-maintenance.yml

Trigger¶

Event	Schedule
`schedule`	Weekdays
`workflow_dispatch`	Manual

Inputs¶

Input	Description	Required	Default
`additional-instructions`	Repo-specific instructions appended to the agent prompt	No	`""`
`setup-commands`	Shell commands run before the agent starts	No	`""`
`allowed-bot-users`	Allowlisted bot actor usernames (comma-separated)	No	`github-actions[bot]`
`stale-label`	Label used to mark stale issues	No	`stale`

Safe Outputs¶

create-issue — file a stale issues report (max 1, auto-closes older reports)
add-labels — apply the stale label to issues identified as likely resolved

Pairing¶

This workflow is the investigation companion to Stale Issues Remediator. The investigator finds and labels stale candidates; the remediator handles objections and closes expired ones. Install both for a fully autonomous stale-issue lifecycle, or use the investigator alone for human-in-the-loop review.

Example Workflow¶

name: Stale Issues Investigator
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 15 * * 1-5"
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  issues: write
  pull-requests: read

jobs:
  run:
    uses: elastic/ai-github-actions/.github/workflows/gh-aw-stale-issues-investigator.lock.yml@v0
    secrets:
      COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN }}