Hi,

Field Note #3. Today's case: DraftCat, the GitHub issue-triage agent I run on my own repos - and what I learned the hard way about auto-closing.

A triage agent is useful if it gets three things right: labels, duplicates, and a first-draft reply - and leaves the close-button click to a human. I let it auto-close high-confidence duplicates in v1. It was not worth it.

What's inside:

• Why auto-close at confidence > 0.95 still goes wrong (and the public-thread argument that killed it)

• Hybrid duplicate detection: exact-title pre-pass + vector embeddings (cosine ≥ 0.85 over the last 1000 closed issues)

• Three confidence bands (auto / review / defer) - not one threshold

• Idempotency keys on every webhook (because GitHub redelivers, and you double-label without them)

• Full architecture + an 8-step checklist for your own repos

Read the full case →

René

Keep reading