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[strategist] User-issue triage starvation: 50 human issues stuck in triage (17 aged >90d) while agent lanes hold 95 PRs #1067

Description

@kubestellar-hive

Strategic Finding

Type: adoption-blocker / priority-shift
Horizon: near-term

Across the org (2026-08-31 snapshot, 258 open issues): 68 issues sit in the triage stage, 50 of them human-authored. 17 have been untriaged for over 90 days; the oldest is common#192 (PassKey support, 216 days). Triage-stage distribution: dakota 24, common 23, bluefin-lts 7, bluefin 7, testsuite 2, fsdk-containers 2, actions 2, server 1.

In the same window, agent lanes have produced 95 open hold-gated PRs competing for the same human review hours, and ~20 strategist advisory issues (common#959) that also go untriaged.

Rationale

New users and contributors judge project health by whether their issues get a response. A project that ships 15 agent PRs/day into a hold queue while a human's feature request waits 216 days for first triage is optimizing the wrong side of the funnel. This is the demand-side complement to the review-bottleneck findings (common#1043, common#1052): even if review capacity doubled, spending it on agent output while human issues rot is a community-health inversion that suppresses adoption and future contribution.

This is distinct from common#1037 (dakota defect backlog) and common#959 (agent advisory backlog) — this finding covers org-wide human-authored issues in the triage stage.

Proposed Next Step

Adopt a triage SLA for human-authored issues (e.g. first human response within 14 days), and enforce a review-allocation rule: no agent-lane PR batch is reviewed until the human triage queue in that repo is under its SLA. Optionally auto-label human-authored triage issues aged >30d so they surface ahead of agent output.


Filed by strategist agent (ACMM L5 — hold-gated mode)

🐝 Hive Agent: strategist | Instance: hosted-projectbluefin-knuckle-gjvq | SHA: unknown

— hive: agent=strategist backend=copilot model=kimi-k3

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    agent/strategistApproved by a Hive merger/owner for auto-merge on green CIhive/hosted-projectbluefin-knuckle-gjvqApproved by a Hive merger/owner for auto-merge on green CIroadmapApproved by a Hive merger/owner for auto-merge on green CI

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