(idea): Find Related Github Issues #35
Description
The Problem
When working on GitHub issues or pull requests, developers often need to find related issues to:
- Avoid duplicate work
- Understand the full context of a problem
- Find similar bugs or feature requests
- Track related discussions
- Identify patterns in user feedback
Currently, this requires manual searching through GitHub's search interface, which can be time-consuming and may miss relevant issues due to different terminology or incomplete search queries.
The Idea
Create a tool (initially as a Chrome extension) that helps developers find related GitHub issues through:
-
Smart Issue Analysis
- Analyzes the current issue/PR content
- Uses LLM to understand the context and intent
- Identifies key topics, technologies, and problems mentioned
-
Intelligent Search
- Automatically generates relevant search queries
- Searches across the entire repository or organization
- Considers semantic similarity, not just keyword matching
-
User Interface
- Chrome extension that adds a "Related Issues" panel to GitHub
- Shows related issues with relevance scores
- Allows filtering and sorting by various criteria
- Provides quick access to issue details
-
Future CLI Version
- Command-line interface for finding related issues
- Integration with git workflow
- Support for bulk analysis of multiple issues
- Export capabilities for reports
Nice to have
- Integration with project management tools (Jira, Linear, etc.)
- Support for private repositories
- Custom search filters and preferences
- Issue clustering to show groups of related issues
- Historical analysis to show how issues evolved
- AI-powered suggestions for issue resolution
- Export functionality for documentation
- Support for multiple GitHub organizations
- Batch processing of issues
- Integration with GitHub Actions for automated analysis
Audience
Primary audience:
- Software developers working on GitHub projects
- Project managers tracking issues and features
- Open source maintainers
- Technical writers documenting issues
- Quality assurance engineers
- Community managers
Reach
This tool could be valuable for:
- Open source projects with many contributors
- Large organizations with multiple repositories
- Small teams managing multiple projects
- Individual developers working across different repositories
- Technical documentation teams
The tool has potential for both free (open source) and paid (enterprise) versions, making it accessible to a wide range of users while supporting sustainable development.
Level of effort
Medium
Implementation requirements:
- 2-3 engineers
- 1-2 months for initial version
- Frontend developer for Chrome extension
- Backend developer for search and analysis
- ML/AI expertise for LLM integration
Experience
Helpful background:
- Chrome extension development
- GitHub API knowledge
- Experience with LLM APIs
- Search engine development
- Natural Language Processing
- Frontend development (React/TypeScript)
- Backend development (Node.js/Python)
Contributing / Open Questions
- How can we ensure the tool works well with different coding languages and domains?
- What's the best way to handle rate limiting with GitHub's API?
- How can we make the search results more accurate and relevant?
- Should we support other issue tracking platforms besides GitHub?
- How can we handle different languages in issue descriptions?
- What's the best way to present related issues to users?
- How can we make the tool extensible for different use cases?
- What metrics should we use to measure the tool's effectiveness?
- How can we handle sensitive information in private repositories?
- What's the best way to integrate with existing developer workflows?