Issues

Issues in Lisa aren't just titles and descriptions thrown into a backlog. They're structured work items with full context, traceability, and developer-ready detail — because the fastest way to slow down a team is a vague ticket.

When Lisa creates an issue, she pulls from your codebase, your project context, and your templates. The result is an issue that an engineer can pick up and start working on without a follow-up conversation.

Creating issues

There are several ways to create issues in Lisa:

• AI Chat — describe what you want to build and ask Lisa to break it into issues. This is the most powerful method because Lisa uses your codebase and project context to generate structured, relevant work items.
• Discovery Sessions — Lisa's guided planning flow produces issues as part of a full project breakdown.
• Slack Insights — when Lisa detects feature requests, bugs, or tasks in your connected Slack channels, she suggests issues you can review and accept from the Insights page.
• UI — use the create button on the issues page for quick manual creation.
• API — POST /api/v1/issues for programmatic creation.
• CLI — lisa issue create from your terminal.
• Sync — issues imported from Linear or GitHub via bidirectional sync.

Issue structure

Every issue in Lisa has a consistent set of fields:

When Lisa generates issues through chat or discovery, she fills in all relevant fields automatically — including priority, type, and labels — based on the conversation context and your codebase.

Acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria live inside the issue body as markdown checkboxes. Lisa generates these as part of issue creation, and they include verification hints that tell developers exactly how to validate their work:

- [ ] User receives notification within 5 seconds of event
  → Verify: Check WebSocket message timestamp delta
- [ ] Notification persists in database after delivery
  → Verify: Query notifications table after send
- [ ] Unread count updates in real-time across tabs
  → Verify: Watch badge count on secondary browser tab

Lisa tracks completion automatically — you'll see an "Acceptance Criteria: 2/5 completed" counter on each issue as checkboxes get ticked off.

Hierarchies

Issues support parent/child relationships up to two levels deep. A parent issue can have sub-issues, but sub-issues can't have their own children — this keeps hierarchies flat and manageable.

• Navigate between parent and sub-issues from any issue's detail view.
• Add sub-issues inline from a parent issue.
• Filter the issue list to show or hide sub-issues with the toggle.
• Lisa automatically creates hierarchies when she breaks down features — a feature becomes the parent, and its implementation steps become sub-issues.

Dependencies

Track relationships between issues so your team knows what to work on first:

• Blocks — issue A must be completed before issue B can start.
• Relates to — issues are connected but not blocking each other.

Add dependencies from an issue's detail page. Lisa also creates dependencies automatically when she detects that one piece of work depends on another — for example, "database migration" blocking "API endpoint implementation."

Labels

Labels are free-form tags you can attach to any issue. Type a label name and press Enter or comma to add it. There are no predefined labels — use whatever categorization makes sense for your team (e.g., frontend, infrastructure, needs-design, tech-debt).

Filtering and sorting

The issues list supports composable filters so you can find exactly what you need:

• Search — full-text search on issue titles.
• Status — filter by any status value.
• Priority — filter by priority level.
• Type — filter by issue type.
• Project — scope to a specific project.
• Sub-issues — toggle to show or hide sub-issues in the list.

Sort by creation date, last updated, title, status, priority, or type. All filters can be combined, and a filter counter shows how many are active.

Bulk operations

Select multiple issues to update or delete in batch (up to 50 at a time):

• Update status, priority, milestone, or project across all selected issues.
• Delete multiple issues at once.

This is useful for sprint cleanup, milestone reassignment, or triaging a backlog.