GitHub Discussions

What is it?

This skill enables agents to manage GitHub Discussions within a repository. Since discussions are primarily accessible via GraphQL, this skill provides the necessary patterns and templates to create, list, and comment on discussions safely.

Success Criteria

• Discussion categories are correctly identified by their names and IDs.
• New discussions are posted in the most relevant category.
• Comments and replies are linked to the correct parent discussion or comment ID.
• Search queries are used to find relevant existing discussions before creating new ones.

Why use it?

• Community engagement: Facilitate open conversations outside of issues and PRs
• GraphQL mastery: Handles the complexity of GitHub's GraphQL API for discussions
• Category organization: Ensures discussions are properly categorized (Q&A, Ideas, Announcements)
• Context awareness: Searches existing discussions before creating duplicates
• Threaded conversations: Manages replies and comment hierarchies effectively

When to use this skill

• "List the most recent discussions in this repository."
• "Start a new discussion about the proposed architectural changes."
• "Respond to the user's question in the 'Q&A' category."
• "What are the available discussion categories?"
• "Find discussions related to 'performance' and summarize them."

What this skill can do

• Exploration: List discussions, categories, and comments.
• Engagement: Create new discussions, add comments, and reply to existing comments.
• Organization: Identify categories to ensure discussions are properly placed.

What this skill will NOT do

• Manage repository-level settings (use github-admin).
• Manage issues or pull requests (use github-issues or github-pr-flow).
• Perform complex moderation tasks (locking/hiding) unless explicitly requested.

How to use this skill

1. Discovery: Start by listing discussion categories to get the categoryId for new posts.
2. Context: Use the search or list operations to understand current community activity.
3. Execution: Use gh api graphql with the provided templates to perform mutations (create/comment).

Tool usage rules

• GraphQL Focused: DISCUSSIONS MUST BE MANAGED VIA gh api graphql. There is no native gh discussion command.
• ID Resolution: Always fetch repositoryId and categoryId dynamically before creating a discussion.
• Category Match: Ensure the category allows new discussions (some may be read-only).
• Search First: Before creating new discussions, search for existing ones using the search query to prevent duplicates.
• Search Syntax: Format search queries as repo:owner/name <keywords> or add filters like category:Ideas.
• Threaded Replies: Use replyToId parameter when responding to specific comments for threaded conversations.
• Q&A Answers: Only the discussion author can mark comments as answers in Q&A category discussions.
• Pagination: Use after cursor with pageInfo.endCursor for fetching more than 20-100 results.

Examples

See references/examples.md for concrete GraphQL and CLI patterns.

Query Templates

See references/GRAPHQL_QUERIES.md for ready-to-use GraphQL snippets.

References

• GitHub Discussions GraphQL API
• Search Discussions Syntax
• GitHub GraphQL API Explorer
• Discussions Mutations Reference