oh-my-issues

Turn an issue backlog into a roadmap. Issues are symptom data, not units of work, the unit of work is the architectural defect that produces them. The end state is open issues == open plans, 1:1.

Core principle

Stop closing issues one at a time. Group symptoms that share a single architectural fix into a cluster, give the cluster one canonical home (a plan-master issue + a plans/0X-*.md design doc), close every child with a standardized redirect, and ship one PR per cluster that closes all children atomically. New incoming bugs get appended to the matching master as a "Round N" comment, not opened as new tracked issues.

This compounds three ways: architectural fixes retire whole symptom families, the plan's test matrix institutionalizes prevention in CI, and standardized triage makes residual inflow cheap.

When to use

• The repo has 20+ open issues and many feel like duplicates or platform-specific symptoms of the same defect.
• The user asks to "triage", "consolidate", "cluster", "dedupe", "group", or "make a plan from" the issue list.
• A new bug is filed and the user wants to know whether it belongs to existing work.
• The user wants to ship a focused PR that resolves a cluster of related issues.

When NOT to use

• Fewer than ~15 open issues: just close them.
• Issues are genuinely independent (no shared root causes): one fix per issue is correct.
• The repo lacks plans/ discipline and the user does not want to introduce one, propose first, do not impose.

Three modes

Mode 1: Cluster pass (initial reduction)

Use when the backlog has never been consolidated. Goal: go from N issues to N_plans masters in one operation.