factory-triage

Triage the open Linear issues for the repository I'm currently in: turn raw Triage tickets into fully specified, agent-dispatchable ones where possible.

Resolve the team from the repo via config/repos.yaml (docs/protocol.md §1). Use factory ticket; on failure retry once then fall back to factory ticket raw per the floor. Interpret $ARGUMENTS as specific issue IDs, a max count, or "all" (workspace-wide); default is this repo's team, up to 10 issues.

Claim what you are triaging

Before working an issue, mark it so it appears in Agents In Flight and no other agent picks it up: set assignee to yourself and add ai:in-progress + agent:<your-harness>. Leave the state alone — a ticket being specified is still Triage; In Progress means implementation is underway and would misrepresent it.

Remove ai:in-progress when you finish that issue, whether you promoted it, held it, or closed it. A claim marker left behind makes a finished ticket look live forever. (The reaper clears stale ones after 45 minutes of silence, but relying on that means a lost 45 minutes.)

Claim one issue at a time as you get to it, not all of them up front — a batch claimed and then abandoned blocks the queue for everything you never reached.

Answered holds come first. Before the Triage pile, check for tickets carrying ai:blocked (in Blocked or Triage) that have a comment newer than the label's application — the orchestrator's gate resurfaces exactly these, and a human answer that sits unread costs a round-trip through the slowest part of the pipeline. For each: read the reply, remove ai:blocked, then re-run promote-or-hold below with the answer in hand (and record the decision in the product-decisions doc where it belongs). If the reply doesn't actually resolve the hold, comment a sharper question and re-add ai:blocked — removing and re-adding is required, not optional: the fresh label event is what resets the orchestrator's reply detection, and a hold that keeps the old label event gets re-examined every tick forever.

For each issue in Triage state, plus any Todo issue that is missing the ai:agent-ready label or carries it without actually satisfying §5 (see step 0 below):

1. Run the mechanical template guard first, don't re-derive it by hand. factory label-guard --repo <this repo> --apply checks every Todo + ai:agent-ready ticket in scope for the two §5 sections that are mechanically load-bearing — Owned Paths (what dispatch's collision check reads) and Verification Command/an evidence line (what "done" runs) — and demotes anything failing straight to Triage with a comment, no LLM judgment needed for that part. Run it before working the Triage pile so those demotions are already in it. It deliberately does not check Problem & Context / Acceptance Criteria / Source File Pointers — those vary too much in legitimate format to check safely by regex (an early version did, and flagged an Urgent, fully-actionable ticket as broken). So still use judgment on anything that looks off in those three sections as you work a ticket normally — the guard catches the mechanical case (a ticket like CLNT-871/872, built from a 4-section support-ticket format rather than the §5 template), not spec-quality judgment calls.
2. Sanity check — is it a duplicate of an existing issue, already fixed in the codebase or git history, or obsolete? If so, say which and mark it (duplicate → link + cancel, fixed → comment with evidence + close). Check "already fixed" against origin/<base>, per the floor's Checkout freshness rule — a behind-trunk working tree answers this question wrong in the expensive direction. Confirm with me before canceling anything non-obvious.
3. Specify — investigate the codebase enough to write the full §5 AI-ready template: Problem & Context, observable Acceptance Criteria, Source File Pointers and Owned Paths (strictly verify path existence on origin/<base> for all entries in Source File Pointers and Owned Paths prior to promoting to ai:agent-ready — a pointer or owned path to a nonexistent or moved path breaks concurrency checks or sends the implementation agent to a file that isn't there), and a Verification Command that actually runs in this repo. Assess verification gate adequacy: ensure the command tests the ticket's primary failure mode and is not blind to its primary risk (e.g. typecheck commands covering excluded directories, or vacuous test suites); when gates are known-weak or have coverage gaps, explicitly document compensating checks or verification gaps in the description. For non-code work, the evidence line replaces the verification command.
4. Route — correct project, canonical type:* + area:* labels, evidence-based priority. Add the source:* label if missing (source:human for owner-filed items, source:agent/source:sentry/source:client-support by origin) — triage is the backstop that keeps source attribution complete. Read the issue's current state before writing — the GitHub integration may have moved it already.