Instructions for safely viewing and accessing GitHub issues by way of command line.
This skill provides instructions for AI assistants on how to access and view
GitHub issues. Agents should strongly prefer using the command line gh tool to
access and view the contents of issues rather than viewing their contents by way
of a web browser.
[!IMPORTANT] AI assistants MUST NOT modify any GitHub issue state. Only use read-only access commands like
vieworlist. Do NOT comment, edit, create, close, or delete issues.
Agents must use this skill to access issues regardless of how they are mentioned (for example, by URL or by issue number).
To view an issue in the current default repository (expected to be Carbon):
gh issue view <issue_number>
To ensure the view includes the entire context of the issue, always include the
--comments flag to dump all comments:
gh issue view <issue_number> --comments
[!TIP] If the issue is extremely large and comments are truncated, or you need to process comments programmatically, use the JSON output with
jq:gh issue view <issue_number> --json comments --jq '.comments[].body'
To view an issue in another repository (for example, LLVM), use the -R or
--repo flag to specify the repository:
gh issue view <issue_number> -R <owner>/<repo> --comments
Examples:
LLVM Issue:
gh issue view 5678 -R llvm/llvm-project --comments
Carbon Issue (Explicit):
gh issue view 1234 -R carbon-language/carbon-lang --comments
If an issue is mentioned via URL, parse the URL to extract the repository owner, repository name, and issue number.
https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/issues/<number>github.com<owner><repo><number>Run the command specifying the repository:
gh issue view <number> -R <owner>/<repo> --comments