Yo dawg, I heard you like duplicate detection

Context: I asked Claude to file a feedback issue about "Claude should search for duplicates before creating issues." Claude searched first (good), found an existing issue (#20224) that requested exactly this.

That issue was auto-closed as stale — after the duplicate-detection bot flagged it as a duplicate of three loosely related issues that weren't actually the same thing.

So: the feature request about deduplication was killed by bad deduplication.

This is a real problem. The issues repo is growing fast and genuine feedback gets lost in noise. Claude filing issues via gh without checking for duplicates makes it worse. And the current bot-based deduplication is too aggressive with false positives and too passive with actual duplicates.

Previous issue: #20224 (auto-closed, locked)