AI-driven issue triage is systematically destroying valid bug reports

Summary

The automated issue triage system on this repository is creating self-reinforcing false-duplicate chains that bury legitimate bugs and feature requests. This is not an edge case — it is a systemic, well-documented failure that is actively harming the project's ability to track and resolve real problems.

This issue has been raised before (#19267, #26434), but the pattern continues unabated. The evidence below demonstrates that this is a fundamental failure of project management, not a minor tooling hiccup.

The Core Problem

When the bot incorrectly closes Issue A as a duplicate of Issue B, every future report of the same problem gets closed as a duplicate of the already-closed Issue A or B. The result is a graveyard of valid reports all pointing at each other, with no canonical issue actually being tracked or worked on.

Worse: the bot locks closed issues after 7 days (#35265), meaning authors can't even protest false closures after the fact. The appeals process is sealed shut by automation.

Documented Evidence

1. Circular Duplicate Chains — 36 and Counting

Issue #19267 documents 36 cases where the bot closed issues as duplicates of each other, leaving zero open canonical issues. Examples:

• #4182 closed as dup of #5528, #5528 closed as dup of #4182
• #2844 → #2886 → #4039 → #2844 (three-way circular closure)
• Dozens more pairs: #20723/#20724, #21350/#21351, #22788/#22790, #25098/#25099, #27482/#27483, #28541/#28542

These aren't near-misses. These are bugs that the project literally cannot see anymore because the bot ate both ends of the chain.

2. Paste Feature Request — Text ≠ Images

Issue #27564 requested unified Ctrl+V handling for text and images. The bot closed it as a duplicate of #12644, which is exclusively about image/screenshot paste. The text-paste aspect — the actual feature request — was silently discarded. The same request had to be re-filed as #34818.

3. Bash Permissions — 30+ Issues, No Resolution

Issue #30519 documents 30+ open issues about fundamentally broken permission matching for multi-line, piped, and glob-pattern bash commands. The bot has been enthusiastically closing these as duplicates of each other for months:

• #34811 → linked to #34810, #29967, #11775
• #31889 → linked to #31735, #29529, #31170
• #35034 → bot tried to close as dup of #819, #6850, #29529
• #28811, #34379, #32876, #35571, #34908 — all variants of the same broken glob matching, scattered across the tracker

The underlying bug remains unfixed. The bot's contribution has been to fragment the signal across dozens of half-closed issues, making it harder — not easier — for a developer to understand the scope of the problem.

4. Bot Overrides Human Feedback

Issue #18813 documents a case where a user downvoted the bot's duplicate suggestion and the bot closed it anyway. The automation is not even responsive to the feedback mechanisms it presents to users.

Why This Matters

Automated issue closure is a reasonable optimization when it works. False automated issue closure is worse than no automation at all, because it creates an illusion of a managed tracker while actively destroying the information the tracker exists to preserve.

The current system:

1. Silences valid reports by closing them as duplicates of unrelated or already-closed issues
2. Fragments real bugs across dozens of semi-closed issues instead of consolidating them
3. Locks users out of correcting false closures after 7 days
4. Ignores user feedback — downvotes on duplicate suggestions don't prevent closure
5. Creates circular chains where every report of a bug points to another closed report of the same bug

With 250-317 new issues per day (#26434) and only 96 of 5,947 open issues having an assignee, the tracker is already under extreme pressure. The bot is not alleviating that pressure — it is converting it into invisible data loss.

Recommendation

• Require human approval before any issue is closed as a duplicate
• Remove auto-locking on closed issues, or extend the window significantly, so users can contest false closures
• Audit existing duplicate chains — #19267 identified 36 circular closures; the real number is certainly higher
• Do not close issues that receive downvotes on the duplicate suggestion