Every maintainer knows the ritual. You open the queue at 8 AM, and fifteen tabs are the same bug. One has no logs. Another has a title that reads like a ransom note. The third is a feature request wearing a bug costume.
I was losing my mornings to that queue. So I ran a small experiment. Could a free AI sort the mess before I looked at it? No paid APIs. No GPU budget. Just free model access and a free server option.
This article is the runbook. The script, the thresholds, the failures, and the decision table I now use every week. If you maintain anything with an issue tracker, steal all of it.
Why Triage Is a Filter, Not a Decision
Triage is pattern matching. Duplicate titles. Missing stack traces. Feature requests disguised as bugs. Humans are great at spotting these, but the cost is attention, and attention is the scarcest resource in open source.
