Turn a GitHub Issue thread into a conversational chat interface powered by the OpenAI API, orchestrated entirely with GitHub Actions.

Chatty-Issues — POC

Turn a GitHub Issue thread into a conversational chat interface powered by the OpenAI API, orchestrated entirely with GitHub Actions.

Open an issue → the bot replies to the issue body.
Add a comment → the bot replies using the full issue history (issue body + all comments in order).

No external database: the issue thread is the conversation state.

Setup

Add a repository secret
- OPENAI_API_KEY (required)
Optional: add a repository variable
- OPENAI_MODEL — if unset, the script uses gpt-4o-mini.
Commit and push the workflows in .github/workflows/ (and package-lock.json for reproducible installs).

issue-opened.yml — runs on issues: opened; sends the issue body to OpenAI and posts the reply as a comment.
issue-commented.yml — runs on issue_comment: created; skips comments by github-actions[bot] (loop prevention), fetches the full issue + all comments, rebuilds the conversation, calls OpenAI, and posts the reply.

Both workflows use npm ci and then npm run respond (runs scripts/respond.mjs).

Path	Purpose
`.github/workflows/`	Issue-opened and issue-commented workflows
`scripts/respond.mjs`	Builds chat history, calls OpenAI, posts comments
`prompts/system.md`	Versioned system prompt for the assistant
`specs/`	Chat history and OpenAI request contracts
`docs/`	POC notes and limitations

POC scope: If the thread grows beyond the model context window, the API may error. No summarization, rate limiting, or multi-repo support.
See docs/POC-NOTES.md for intentional limitations.