Troubleshooting

The summary of each run says what the assistant did and why; the runs are under Actions → Issue assistant.

Symptom	Cause	Fix
No comment on an issue that you or another maintainer opened	Issues of the owner, members and collaborators get labels only	Run the workflow by hand with the task triage and the dry run turned off
No comment, and the run notes No credentials for Claude are configured, or another engine	The engine's secret is missing	Add the secret that Engines names, such as CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for Claude, to the environment issue-assistant, as Set up a repository shows
No comment, and the job analyze is skipped	The repository variable ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI is off	gh variable delete ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI
No comment, and the issue has the label invalid	The AI took the issue for spam	Remove the label; to get an analysis, run the workflow by hand
No comment, and the run notes Daily limit of AI runs reached or Daily limit of analyses for this reporter reached	More new issues, follow-ups and replies after a release came in during the 24 hours before than max_per_day allows, or the reporter opened more than max_per_author_per_day issues in them	Run the workflow by hand with the task triage. If your repository usually gets more issues a day, raise the limit under [engine] in config.toml
A comment after the release left the issue closed, and the run notes Limit of comments read after the release reached	The AI reads only release_replies comments of the reporter after each release	Read the comment and reopen the issue yourself, or run the workflow by hand with the task release-reply
No comment, and the job apply shows an error	The checks refused the AI's answer, such as one that broke its schema or held something like a secret; nothing was posted	The error names the reason; run the workflow by hand to try again
analyze waits for a runner	The runs of one issue wait for each other, first in, first out; or the runner ubuntu-24.04-firewall is not available to the repository	Wait for the run before it. A job that finds no runner fails after 24 hours: check the preview's README, and meanwhile name another runner for the AI with gh variable set ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI_RUNNER --body ubuntu-24.04, as What if the firewall runner is gone? explains, or set ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI to off
The job event fails with ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI_RUNNER names the runner	The variable names a runner where nothing would keep the AI to the hosts of the firewall policy, such as a self-hosted runner or ubuntu-latest	Name one of GitHub's runners of Ubuntu with a fixed version, such as ubuntu-24.04, or gh variable delete ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI_RUNNER
The step Make sure that the block holds of analyze fails	On the runner of ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI_RUNNER, Harden-Runner still let requests to a host outside the firewall policy through after a minute: in a private repository without a subscription of StepSecurity, while its service is down, or when its agent gave up at its start, with Reverted changes in the log of its step	Run the job again. In a private repository, subscribe to StepSecurity, or gh variable delete ISSUE_ASSISTANT_AI_RUNNER to use the firewall runner again
A job without the AI hangs after its last step, at Cleaning up orphan processes, until its timeout, or its checkout fails with Couldn't connect to server	Harden-Runner before 2.22.3, on a runner in westus2, the region that the first lines of the log of the job name: its agent misses the addresses of the allowed hosts there and drops them	Update to the latest release, whose workflows carry a fixed Harden-Runner, and run the job again
analyze waits for a review	The environment issue-assistant requires reviewers	Remove the reviewers; the rule that only the default branch may use the environment is the protection it needs
A step of analyze fails to connect, and the summary of the run lists a denied host	The egress firewall blocked a host that the engine's action needs, often after an update of the action	Update to the latest release and run install again. It keeps your firewall policy, and check then names each host of the template that the policy misses, to add there
Every run fails with is no valid TOML or must be a whole number, a string, a list of strings or true or false	A settings file isn't TOML, or a value has the wrong type, such as a number in quotes	Fix the file and the key that the error names; run check to see every problem at once
Runs warn of an unknown key or a key that belongs in the section of another	A key has a typo or stands in the wrong section, so the assistant keeps its default	Rename or move the key as the warning suggests; check fails on it in your CI
check says replace the starter's first line of project.md	The file still describes no project, and the AI reads it before every task	Write what the project does and for whom, and where its code and documentation are
check says that labels differ only in case	GitHub takes bug and Bug for one label	Keep one of them in .github/labels.toml
check says that a workflow differs from the template of the issue assistant	The workflow was changed by hand, or comes from another release than the action of the check	Run the commands that the message names, which install the templates of the check's release
An issue closed when its fix was merged, not with the release	GitHub closes the issues that a merged pull request names	Under Settings → General → Issues, clear Auto-close issues with merged linked pull requests; a repository without releases sets close_with_release = false
An issue with fixed-in-next-release stays open after a release	The release is a draft or a pre-release, it doesn't contain every pull request that fixes the issue, or a maintainer set the label by hand after it, which waits for the next one	Publish a final release that contains the fixes; the sweep of the next morning closes the issue, or start Issue lifecycle by hand
An issue still waits for its reporter after they changed the title	Only a comment or an edit of the text answers the questions	Nothing to fix: the reporter answers in a comment or in the text. To end the waiting yourself, remove needs-info
A label of .github/labels.toml is missing in the repository	The Labels workflow runs when labels.toml changes on main, not before	Run it by hand: gh workflow run labels.yml