[BUG] github-actions incorrectly closed a bunch of issues for "60 days of inactivity"

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

A bunch of my bugs reports got closed today for "60 days of inactivity", despite me responding "this is still relevant" to the "30 days of inactivity" message. E.g. #3006, #3030, #7742, #7743,

What Should Happen?

Do not close and/or allow to reopen.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

No clue.

Claude Model

None

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

No response

Claude Code Version

N/A

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

No response

@catherinewu looks like github-bot also ignored you on #3039 :(

Hopefully @ashwin-ant can comment on this behavior.

Updated my original comment so the discussion is more clear: There was some recent activity around this https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/5e3e9408feea99c66bd2344f0e19b5f25d2a6b11, maybe the removal of autoclose was failing before this revert?

Actually, on the examples I pointed out the autoclose label was correctly removed, but the issue was still autoclosed :(

I see, let's also tag @dhollman, who comitted the "60 days of inactivity" workflow https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/6369, and @bcherny and @km-anthropic, who reviewed it.

Interestingly, the above PR, was at least party "Generated with [Claude Code]", and its description contains this comment "Closes issues that have been inactive for 60 days (where last comment was the warning)". This requirement could be treated by the machine that human activities are not taken into account for "60 days of inactivity", or misimplemented.

In the meantime you can upvote all discussions listed in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182939. If the author of the issue could reopen it, the damage by autoclose bots would be smaller (similar damage is being/was made to other repos, e.g. https://github.com/Azure/AKS/issues/3474).

I’ve had this happen to so many issues. Very frustrating.

@marcindulak - thank you for linking me to this issue.

Thank you @marcindulak for bringing this to my attention, and to @ANogin for initially reporting it.

Even when functioning properly, auto-close bots are harmful to community contributions:

• Auto-closing without proper resolution is disrespectful to the original reporter and anyone else who contributed to the report.
• It just sweeps the issue under the carpet, blindly hoping that it will magically fix itself. (The fact that this can sometimes happen doesn't justify doing it in all the other cases.)
• When issues or feature requests are marked as closed without resolution, then people are more likely to miss them, resulting in duplicate reports and consequently fragmented information.
• People searching for ways to contribute are much more likely to miss closed issues too.
• Long-standing issues are less likely to get resolved. Here's an example of a success story when issues can remain open for a long time.

See also this post.

I do understand it is annoying and perhaps even stressful to have open issues going nowhere. One solution for this is to label short-lived and long-lived issues differently to distinguish them. Another is assigning issues to different milestones. This makes it clear to users which issues are likely to be fixed sooner rather than later. Proper triage processes are valuable, but simply closing issues is not the solution. Personally I have found this highly demotivating, and will reconsider whether it's worth contributing feedback (for free, as a paying customer) to Claude Code in future, given that it generally just gets ignored.

this is very annoying, please fix this. Your Claudes are taking over, Anthropic

@marcindulak - I've noticed issues are now also being locked due to having no activity since being closed, despite you having commented on them since they were closed (to link to this issue).

For example: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/7760#issuecomment-3768564443

I think one would need to comment repeatedly every week to prevent the "has not had any activity for 7 days" bot from locking the issue.

Let me check this assumption by commenting on https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8528#issuecomment-3773927503

@bcherny this is a big issue for anthropic systemically getting the feedback for active and ongoing Claude Code bugs. You might want to take a look

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11804

I think one would need to comment repeatedly every week to prevent the "has not had any activity for 7 days" bot from locking the issue.

Let me check this assumption by commenting on #8528 (comment)

There is an interesting outcome of this experiment:

1. Issue with a fresh comment - not locked https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8528#issuecomment-3773927503
2. Issue without a fresh comment - claimed to be bo locked, but not locked https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9675#issuecomment-3792145177
3. Issue without a fresh comment - locked https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11009#issuecomment-3784635761

I won't be opening any issue about this locking failure (Failed to lock issue #9675: Requires authentication) problem yet.

Fix here if anyone wants to contribute a review.

The bot is now locking those same issues, such as https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/516. This is a problem.

Locking the issue after 7 days of inactivity after the issue is closed works as designed, except the locking bot fails sometimes to lock. For details see https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16497#issuecomment-3792158713

so much talk about AGI but we can't get a GitHub bot to work correctly

For your information, there are at least two more broken github action workflows, in addition to our "60 days of inactivity" one:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/19267 [Bug] The github bot creates impenetrable webs of duplicate tags in bug reports -- all of which will be closed in 3 days https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21953 [BUG] Oncall Issue Triage fails to find relevant issues

#6213 is still an issue for me (has been since August) and was just incorrectly closed.

100th 👍!

Example I came here from: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1317

reminder: FIX is open for review:

@marcindulak please tell me you're using either @github or @claude to at least semi-automate that. Strong work. I approve of your effort!

The workflow that closes issues due to "60 days of inactivity" is here https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/actions/workflows/stale-issue-manager.yml. and it prints what issues it closes.

I'm not collecting the issues that were incorrectly closed due to "60 days of inactivity", but that from the human comments appear to be resolved. There is currently no way to reliably automate this decision step. It would require a human product manager familiar with Claude Code behavior on various platforms to look at every issue https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21732.

Moreover, fully automating issue triage would remove some of the laughs from generative AI’s failure modes. One of my favorites until now is https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10580.

16497 also appears to have been closed incorrectly. It is now locked so I can't add a comment there.

Blocking user comments on incorrectly closed issues seems like this should be a fire alarm

#11282

Tangentially, I notice that https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22578 was closed as a duplicate even though the instructions say it shouldn't be if the duplicate comment was downvoted. (It's possible that someone downvoted after it was closed, but that seems unlikely.)

(Even more tangentially, I guess that issue really is a duplicate; but the bot should follow the instructions it posts.)

Tangentially, I notice that #22578 was closed as a duplicate even though the instructions say it shouldn't be if the duplicate comment was downvoted. (It's possible that someone downvoted after it was closed, but that seems unlikely.)

(Even more tangentially, I guess that issue really is a duplicate; but the bot should follow the instructions it posts.)

Yes, I also noticed that downvoting is (sometimes?) insufficient to prevent the closure as a duplicate https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/19267#issuecomment-3777595010

I can already see the next OpenAI ad where a client tries to reach customer service and receives "your problem was auto-resolved, thank you for contacting us".

I like Anthropic products, but especially as a company that heavily targets a software dev audience, this is not the message you want to send to your customer base.

@ant-kurt sorry to ping you personally but what would it take to get Anthropic to acknowledge this problem?