gh-issues-by-severity

List open issues, grouped by severity (most severe first), sorted by issue number ascending within each group. Generic across repos: discovers whatever severity:* labels the repo actually has rather than assuming a fixed set.

Process

1. Discover the severity label vocabulary for this repo:

   gh label list --json name --jq '[.[].name | select(startswith("severity:"))]'

   If this is empty, the repo has no severity scheme — every issue falls into a single unlabeled bucket. Say so, then continue (still produce the list, sorted by issue number).

2. Rank the discovered labels. Strip the severity: prefix and match each value (case-insensitive) against these clusters, highest severity first:

   • critical, blocker, p0, sev1
   • high, major, p1, sev2
   • medium, moderate, p2, sev3
   • low, minor, trivial, p3, p4, sev4

   Any discovered value that matches none of these clusters is "unrecognized" — rank it below all recognized clusters, ordered alphabetically among other unrecognized values. unlabeled (no severity:* label on the issue) always ranks lowest of all.

   Build a rank map, e.g. for a repo with critical/high/medium/low:

   {"critical": 4, "high": 3, "medium": 2, "low": 1, "unlabeled": 0}

3. Fetch open issues and sort server-side via jq — don't hand-sort the list yourself:

   gh issue list --state open --limit 1000 --json number,title,labels \
     | jq --argjson rank '<rank map from step 2>' '
       map({
         number,
         title,
         severity: ((.labels[] | select(.name | startswith("severity:")) | .name | sub("^severity:";"")) // "unlabeled"),
         labels: [.labels[].name | select(startswith("severity:") | not)]
       })
       | map(. + {rank: ($rank[.severity] // -1)})
       | sort_by([-.rank, .number])
     '

   (If the user named a different repo, add --repo <owner>/<name>.)

4. Render the sorted JSON as grouped markdown, one section per severity level present (in descending rank order), with a count in the header:

   ## critical (2)
   #42  Auth bypass on login            [bug, needs-triage]
   #58  Data loss on export             [bug]
   
   ## high (1)
   #61  Slow query on dashboard         [enhancement, needs-info]
   
   ## low (3)
   #12  Typo in README                  []
   #19  Flaky test in CI                [needs-triage]
   #30  Missing alt text                []

   Show every label except the severity:* one — no further filtering. Omit the trailing [] bracket if an issue has no other labels, or leave it empty; either is fine, just be consistent within one run.

Notes

• 1000-issue limit is for completeness on typical repos; if a repo somehow exceeds it, mention that the list may be truncated.
• If gh isn't authenticated or the directory isn't a GitHub repo, surface the gh error directly rather than guessing at a fix.