Tag Duplicate PRs and Issues

Use this skill when a maintainer needs to decide whether a pull request or issue is a duplicate of existing work.

This skill is for maintainer triage and grouping. It is not for reviewing the implementation quality of a PR.

Required Setup

Do not write duplicate groups or annotations until this setup is complete. Read-only discovery can still proceed with gitcrawl and live gh.

Companion Skills

Use $gitcrawl first for local candidate discovery. Use the prtags skill from the prtags repo at skills/prtags/SKILL.md when it is available.

Install the CLIs

Install prtags from its latest GitHub release. Do not rely on an old local build unless the maintainer explicitly wants to test unreleased behavior.

prtags CLI install path:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dutifuldev/prtags/main/scripts/install-prtags.sh | bash -s -- --bin-dir "$HOME/.local/bin"

Authenticate prtags

prtags should be logged in with the maintainer's own GitHub account through OAuth device flow. Do not use a shared maintainer token for interactive triage.

prtags auth login
prtags auth status

The expected outcome is that prtags stores the logged-in maintainer identity locally and uses that account for authenticated writes.

Missing-Setup Rule

Do not require an up-front preflight before starting the workflow. Proceed with the normal steps until you actually need a tool or account state.

As soon as you discover that prtags is missing or not logged in at the write step, stop immediately. Do not continue in a partial write mode after that point.

If prtags is missing, ask the user to run:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dutifuldev/prtags/main/scripts/install-prtags.sh | bash -s -- --bin-dir "$HOME/.local/bin"

If prtags auth status shows that the user is not logged in, ask the user to run:

prtags auth login

Resume only after the missing tool or login state has been fixed.

Read-Path Default

For candidate discovery in this workflow, use gitcrawl first. Treat it as the local history and clustering layer for related issues, duplicate attempts, and closed threads.

Use live gh or gh api for the target thread and for any candidate before making an actionable judgment. Use live GitHub when gitcrawl is missing or stale for a concrete reason, such as:

• the target or candidate is not present yet
• the local data is clearly stale or incomplete for the decision you need to make
• gitcrawl errors, times out, or lacks the needed neighbor/search data

When you fall back to live GitHub search, note that you did so and why.

If a later prtags target-level write fails because its own mirror has not caught up, stop and report that the curation backend is missing the target object instead of forcing a fallback write.

Goal

For each target PR or issue:

1. gather duplicate evidence
2. decide whether it is a real duplicate
3. create or reuse one prtags group for that duplicate cluster
4. save the maintainer judgment in prtags
5. rely on normal prtags group writes to drive GitHub comment sync when that integration is configured

Tool Roles

Use the tools with these boundaries:

• gitcrawl is candidate generation and historical context
  • use it first for local title/body search, neighbors, clusters, and closed-thread discovery
  • treat every candidate as a lead until live GitHub confirms it
• gh is live GitHub truth
  • use it for target state, body, comments, reviews, files, linked issues, and current open/closed/merged status
  • use gh search only when gitcrawl is stale, missing data, or cannot express the needed query
• prtags is the maintainer curation layer
  • use it to create or reuse one duplicate group
  • use it to save the duplicate status, confidence, rationale, and group summary
  • use it as the source of truth for the GitHub-facing group comment

Working Rules

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