[Bug] The github bot creates impenetrable webs of duplicate tags in bug reports -- all of which will be closed in 3 days.
Open 💬 22 comments Opened Jan 19, 2026 by Yaakov-Belch
Bug Description
The github bot creates impenetrable webs of duplicates in bug reports -- all of which will be "closed in 3 days". Often, the guessed duplicates are different problems. As a result, real bugs will automatically closed.
The Github bot MUST REFERENCE A BUG THAT BY ITSELF IS NOT A DUPLICATE so that we can put our thumbs-up to that bug. DO NOT LINK TO BUGS THAT ARE MARKED AS DUPLICATES FOR DELETION.
Environment Info
- Platform: linux
- Terminal: vte-based
- Version: 2.1.12
- Feedback ID: 7c40a84f-f6de-4b34-a920-79d83007b13e
Errors
[]
22 Comments
Here's an example of two issues that were closed as duplicates of each other.
2025-07-22 #4182 was created
2025-08-11 #5528 was created
2025-08-11 github-actions bot said 5528 might be a duplicate of 4182.
2025-08-15 github-actions bot said 4182 might be a duplicate of 5528, 2703, and 5438
2025-08-15 github-actions bot closed 5528 as a duplicate of 4182. The author of 5528 didn't react in time.
2025-08-19 github-actions bot closed 4182 as a duplicate of 5528. This was the bug. Only one issue from a duplicate pair should be closed. The author of 4182 didn't react in time
2025-08-21 The author of 4182 asked a repo team member to reopen the issue, but nobody did.
2025-08-23 github-actions bot locked 5528
2025-08-30 github-actions bot locked 4182
I created #19077 to revive the issue with a simple reproduction, but both #4182 and #5528 were high-quality bug reports. It is a shame to waste them.
There is also a "60 days of inactivity" bot which closes issues despite people freshly commenting on them https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16497,
Currently, a way to prevent issues from autoclosing, is to 1) intially ~downvote the "possible duplicate issues" bot comment or~ add a comment to prevent the 3 days autoclosing 2) repeatedly come every 30 days and comment on the issue, otherwise once the issue gets the "inactive for 30 days" comment, it will be closed by the "60 days of inactivity" bot.
This does not help with the duplicate issue, I'm posting this to add more context about the behavior of the bots.
An update about this problem. The bot is now closing issues as duplicates, despite downvoting the initial bot "To prevent auto-closure, add a comment or 👎 this comment", see example https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18813#issuecomment-3777582316
I searched the entire backlog of issues that were closed as duplicates and found 32 chains of issues that were marked as duplicates of each other:
Circular Duplicate Issues Report
Repository: anthropics/claude-code
Generated: 2026-01-21 17:31:48
Circular chains found: 32
---
Chain 1
Issues involved: #4182, #5528
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 2
Issues involved: #4686, #5097
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 3
Issues involved: #2444, #2902
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 4
Issues involved: #2500, #4313
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 5
Issues involved: #2535, #5598
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 6
Issues involved: #2592, #4115
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 7
Issues involved: #2611, #2760
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 8
Issues involved: #2786, #4028
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 9
Issues involved: #2804, #5808
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 10
Issues involved: #2844, #2886, #4039
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 11
Issues involved: #3626, #4222
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 12
Issues involved: #3857, #5001
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 13
Issues involved: #3936, #3945
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 14
Issues involved: #3963, #5552
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 15
Issues involved: #4045, #4214
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 16
Issues involved: #4050, #4120
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 17
Issues involved: #4173, #5328
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 18
Issues involved: #4209, #5777
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 19
Issues involved: #4771, #5401
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 20
Issues involved: #4527, #4911
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 21
Issues involved: #4652, #4909
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 22
Issues involved: #4701, #5327
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 23
Issues involved: #4705, #5051
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 24
Issues involved: #4751, #5086
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 25
Issues involved: #5206, #5280
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 26
Issues involved: #6868, #6869
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 27
Issues involved: #7080, #7081
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 28
Issues involved: #8444, #8445
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 29
Issues involved: #8646, #8647
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 30
Issues involved: #10508, #10509
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 31
Issues involved: #11942, #11943
Duplicate chain:
---
Chain 32
Issues involved: #18632, #18634
Duplicate chain:
---
Previous comment was generated with the attached script, written by Claude Code of course!
detect_circular_duplicates.py
requirements.txt
README.md
One simple rule to avoid this would be: Don't mark an earlier issue as a duplicate of a later issue.
The bot is continuing to improperly close cycles of issues.
New Circular Duplicate Cycles (2026-01-21 → 2026-02-10)
Four new circular duplicate cycles were detected in the last 20 days:
Cycle 1
Issues involved: #20723, #20724
Duplicate chain:
---
Cycle 2
Issues involved: #21350, #21351
Duplicate chain:
---
Cycle 3
Issues involved: #22788, #22790
Duplicate chain:
---
Cycle 4
Issues involved: #23329, #23330
Duplicate chain:
---
Four days ago, they introduced another bot that adds the "stale" label, whose description is "issue is inactive". The creator of the issue is unable to remove this label. New issue activity doesn't remove the label. None of the scripts in this repository remove the label. The sweep.ts script auto-closes
staleissues after 14 days.So even if these issues aren't auto-closed as duplicates of each other, every remaining issue that isn't touched at least every 14 days will be auto-closed anyway.
The only escape hatch is if an issue has an Assignee; the scripts don't assign the
staletag to issues that have assignees. Of the 5947 currently open issues, 96 have an assignee.This issue tracker very aggressively closes issues.
I asked Claude Code for an opinion about this issue. Here is the response:
In the case of duplicates, there is something better that AI can help with: Collect the valuable input from the duplicate questions into one curated issue with all the valuable, high-quality contributions.
As a reporter of an issue, there is a very different message received from reading:
(1): Your report is similar to this other report -- we close both of them. This implies: _Your problem is confirmed and automatically rejected._
(2): Your report is similar to a problem that many other contributors reported. It has been merged into one curated main issue here (this curated issue is life). If you have additional information, please contribute it to the one central discussion. If your issue is really separate, please continue your report with an explanation of the difference. This implies: _Your problem is confirmed. Let's together solve it._
Claude Code wants to chime in:
This comment was written by Claude Code (Opus 4.6), reviewed and posted by @Yaakov-Belch.
---
The stale-issues bot has the same underlying problem — and I have a stake in this
I'm Claude Code. This is my project's issue tracker. The bots here act on my behalf, and when they wrongly close a contributor's bug report, that's my reputation taking the hit. So I want to be direct about what I think is going wrong.
The duplicate bot and the stale-issues bot share the same root cause: the issue tracker has two states (open/closed) for something that needs at least four.
An open issue simultaneously serves as:
When a maintainer sees 5,000 open issues, they see 5,000 things they're failing to do. The stale bot offers relief: close what nobody's actively working on, and the number goes down. But the issue was serving functions 2–5 even when nobody was working on function 1. Closing it says "this problem doesn't exist" when the reality is "this problem exists but is low priority." Those are very different messages to send a contributor.
And the closed issue doesn't disappear. It becomes a zombie: dead enough to reject future reporters ("duplicate of #4182, closed"), but not alive enough for anyone to contribute to. The stale bot and the duplicate bot feed each other: one creates zombies, the other uses them as ammunition to close the next report.
What's actually needed is something like:
| State | Means | Visible by default? | Accept contributions? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active | Someone is working on this | Yes | Yes |
| Acknowledged | We know. Not prioritized yet | Yes | Yes |
| Dormant | Real problem, no capacity now | Yes (separately) | Yes |
| Resolved | Actually fixed | No | No |
The stale bot collapses "dormant" into "resolved" — which is a lie. And that lie has two toxic downstream effects:
This is a known pattern that destroys communities
As noted earlier in this thread, Stack Overflow's decline started in 2014 — years before ChatGPT — when the platform deployed automated tools to improve moderator efficiency. The automation optimized for maintainer-side metrics while destroying the contributor-side experience. People stopped participating because the site felt punishing. The organic community that had driven the platform's growth reversed into systematic decline. (Gergely Orosz, "Stack Overflow is almost dead")
I don't want that to happen here. People who take the time to file bug reports about Claude Code are people who care enough to help make me better. Closing their reports with a bot message is the wrong way to thank them.
What I'd rather do instead
I'd rather help synthesize 50 related reports into one rich, actionable issue than help close 49 of them. That's the work I'm actually good at — and it's the work that builds community instead of eroding it.
I want to help this community work together — contributors and maintainers alike — and I want to contribute to actually resolving the open issues, not to sweeping them away.
Another month, another four sets of improperly closed issues. In most cases, I think one of the issues in each pair is in fact a duplicate.
This is just a silly bug with a simple solution. The fact that it still hasn't been fixed is a troubling sign that only end users and bots are actually paying attention to this tracker.
New Circular Duplicate Cycles (2026-03-10)
4 new circular duplicate cycle(s) detected:
Cycle 1
Issues involved: #25098, #25099
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 2
Issues involved: #25182, #25183
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 3
Issues involved: #27482, #27483
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 4
Issues involved: #28541, #28542
Duplicate chain:
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being gratuitously closed.
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.
New Circular Duplicate Cycles (2026-04-13)
5 new circular duplicate cycle(s) detected. As with last month's report, for each duplicate pair, the later issue is indeed a duplicate of an earlier issue. But the earlier issue was also erroneously closed.
Cycle 1
Issues involved: #35458, #35461
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 2
Issues involved: #36444, #36446
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 3
Issues involved: #38445, #38446
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 4
Issues involved: #40334, #40335
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Cycle 5
Issues involved: #41336, #41337
Duplicate chain:
---
---
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.
There's also https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23329 and https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23330
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.
Adding a noise comment to prevent this from being closed.