issue-management

Use this skill when creating, editing, inspecting, or removing relationships between GitHub issues.

These commands use the Issues 2.0 gh issue support added in GitHub CLI PR cli/cli#13057. Because this feature is new, first confirm the installed gh supports it:

gh issue create --help | grep -E -- '--parent|--blocked-by|--blocking'
gh issue edit --help | grep

If those flags are missing, update gh before trying to manage issue relationships. Do not invent older commands.

Issue reference format

Relationship flags accept issue numbers or issue URLs.

Use a number for an issue in the current repository:

Use a full issue URL for a cross-repository relationship:

Multiple related issues can be passed as a comma-separated list:

Parent and sub-issue relationships

A sub-issue has exactly one parent issue.

To create a new issue directly under a parent:

To set or change the parent of an existing child issue:

To remove the parent from a child issue:

To manage children from the parent issue:

--add-sub-issue moves the child to the new parent if it already has another parent. Do not use --add-sub-issue while editing multiple parent issues in one command; one child cannot be added ambiguously to several parents.

Blocked-by and blocking relationships

Use blocked-by when the issue being edited is waiting on another issue.

Use blocking when the issue being edited blocks another issue.

Equivalent mental model:

means the same relationship as:

Choose the command based on which issue you are already editing.

When creating an issue, set relationships immediately:

Inspecting relationships

Human-readable view shows parent, sub-issues, blocked-by, and blocking metadata when present:

Raw non-TTY output includes stable relationship lines:

For scripts, request the JSON fields explicitly:

subIssues, blockedBy, and blocking are connection objects with nodes and totalCount. subIssuesSummary contains completion counts.

Safe workflow

1. Create any new issue bodies with --body-file, not inline multiline shell strings.
2. Link the relationship using the appropriate gh issue create or gh issue edit flag.
3. Verify with gh issue view <number> or gh issue view <number> --json parent,subIssues,subIssuesSummary,blockedBy,blocking.
4. If editing a PR or parent issue body afterward, replace vague checklist text with concrete issue numbers.