gh-assign-issues

Retarget or assign a set of Codewhale issues to a milestone and/or owners in bulk, verifying every one. The milestone (or assignee) change is the signal; do not narrate it with comments. Use gh for all GitHub calls.

When to use

• You have a concrete list of issue numbers (e.g. from triage) to move into a release milestone such as the current vX.Y.Z, or to assign to owners.
• A milestone was renamed/created and its issues need re-pointing.
• You finished grouping the inbox and want the queue to reflect it without posting public chatter.

This skill changes milestone/assignee only. It does not close, label, comment, merge, or release. Those stay with the maintainer.

Workflow

1. Confirm the exact milestone title. gh issue edit --milestone matches by name, so a typo silently fails (or worse, no-ops). Read the real titles and note the starting open-count:

   gh api repos/codewhale-hq/CodeWhale/milestones \
     --jq '.[] | "\(.number)\t\(.title)\topen=\(.open_issues)\tstate=\(.state)"'
   

   Copy the title string verbatim (e.g. the live vX.Y.Z title). If the target milestone is missing or closed, stop and ask the maintainer; do not create one.

2. Pre-flight each number. gh issue edit will happily retarget a PR or a closed issue, so screen first. The url reveals PR-vs-issue (/pull/ vs /issues/); skip anything not OPEN or that is a PR:

   for N in <N1> <N2> <N3>; do   # substitute the real issue numbers
     gh issue view "$N" --repo codewhale-hq/CodeWhale \
       --json number,state,url,milestone \
       --jq '"\(.number)\t\(.state)\t\(.url)\tmilestone=\(.milestone.title // "none")"'
   done
   

   Flag any row whose url contains /pull/ (it is a PR) or whose state is not OPEN, and exclude it from the loop below.

3. Apply the change, one issue at a time, reporting per-issue success. Use --milestone, --add-assignee, or both: