Detecting Duplicate Issues – Public Preview and issue fields MCP support for GitHub Issues

Duplicate issues are one of the biggest time sinks for maintainers: triaging the same bug filed multiple ways, closing duplicates, and linking back to the original. For large repositories, this can take up hours every week.

As a first step to reduce maintainer triage time, issue creation now flags potential matches against existing issues in the repository as issue details are being populated. If potential matches are found, they appear inline in the issue creation form with up to three suggestions. You can review the suggested issues or continue creating your issue.

This feature is available as a public preview.

Share feedback in the community discussion — it directly shapes what we build next.

Issue fields in the MCP server

AI tools connected to the GitHub MCP server can now read and write issue fields. Agents can create fully triaged issues with priority, area, dates, and other fields automatically set, plus filter existing issues by field values.

For more information, see the community discussion about issue fields in the GitHub MCP server.