Agent skill · laurigates
git-issue-scoping
Read an issue's full comment thread and re-verify its cited evidence at HEAD. Use when scoping a PR or plan from a GitHub issue, or before filing or reversing one in your own tracker.
What it needs
About 7k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Git Issue Scoping Invoke before building a PR, plan, or prototype off a GitHub issue — including issues in repos you own, and before filing or reversing one in your own tracker. Before building a PR (or even an approach) off a GitHub issue, read every comment in the thread — not a fetched summary, not just the body. Issues that look like simple feature requests are often where the maintainer has already converged on a specific design with other experts. A summary compresses exactly the part that matters: the decided mechanism, the agreed scope, and the work someone has already volunteered to do. Applies to repos you own too (§ Your own tracker): the deference part is about upstream, but the load-bearing part is that a tracker records decisions past-you made and no longer remembers. The trap WebFetch (and any "summarize this issue" step) returns a compressed view. It faithfully captures the issue body and headline asks, but silently drops the back-and-forth in the comments where the real decisions live. You then design against the body's framing, build a prototype, and discover — only if you go back and read the comments — that: the maintainer picked a different mechanism than the obvious one, the scope (MUST / WANT / NICE / OUT) was explicitly bounded, a dependency was already prototyped by a collaborator (and may be unreleased, so half your plan isn't even buildable yet), your "open questions" were already answered in the thread — so asking them reads as not having done the homework. Canonical break (jnv #114 → PR #116, 2026-06): a WebFetch summary presented the issue as "extend completion beyond JSON paths." The actual 33-comment thread was a design discussion in which the maintainer and the jaq author had converged on token-based segmentation (jaq's load::lex token trees) plus a new yield filter (an unmerged jaq PR) for the in-paren case, with an explicit scope ladder. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills laurigates/git-issue-scoping