labeler

labeler is a GitHub app that automatically labels newly created issues for you based on your past labelling decisions.

Important

You can install coder-labeler on your repo here.

We currently use it on coder/coder and coder/code-server.

The labeler is well-suited to manage labels that describe or reduce the semantic information of an issue. For example, labels like bug, enhancement, are self-evident from the contents of an issue. Often, a tracker will use labels that add information to an issue, e.g. wontfix, roadmap. These inscriptive labels should be disabled in your configuration.

#5 tracks the automatic disabling of inscriptive labels.

Configuration

The labeler's primary configuration is your label descriptions. This way, the labeler interprets your label system in the same way a human would.

Additionally, the labeler reads your .github/labeler.yml file for a list of Regex exclusions. Here's an example:

# .github/labeler.yml
exclude:
    - good first issue
    - customer.*$

#4 tracks the creation of a dashboard for debugging configuration.

Architecture

sequenceDiagram
    participant GitHub
    participant Labeler as @coder-labeler 
    participant AI as OpenAI
    GitHub->>Labeler: [Create|Reopen] Issue event
    note over Labeler: Load repo data, all labeling is stateless
    Labeler->GitHub: Get all repo issue labels
    Labeler->GitHub: Get last 100 repo issues
    Labeler->AI: Generate setLabels via GPT completion
    Labeler ->> GitHub: Add labels to issue

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The labeler uses a GPT-4o completion with the past 100 opened issues instead of a more complex vector DB / embedding system. This is because of the proven accuracy of @cdr-bot on coder/coder and the fact that the completion approach lets us remove the need for a DB.

Context construction

See aicontext.go for the code that constructs the GPT context.