How Does Codowave Pick Which Issues to Work On?

How Does Codowave Pick Which Issues to Work On?

The thing that makes Codowave backlog-first instead of prompt-first is issue selection: it reads your open GitHub issues and decides what to work on next, rather than waiting for you to assign each one. That decision isn't a black box — it's a scoring pass over filters you set once. Here's exactly how it works.

You Set the Filters Once

Selection starts from constraints you configure, not from guesswork:

• Labels — "take issues tagged bug, good-first-issue, or backend."
• Size / complexity — "under 5 story points" or "under medium complexity."
• Risk level — "avoid anything touching auth, payments, or migrations."
• Assignee — "only unassigned issues" or "only issues on the AI queue label."

These are the boundaries. Codowave never selects outside them. You change them whenever your priorities change.

Then It Scores What's Eligible

Within those boundaries, Codowave ranks the eligible issues by how well-suited they are to autonomous work:

• Clarity — issues with a clear scope and expected behavior score higher than vague ones ("improve performance" scores low; "fix the null pointer when address is null" scores high).
• Complexity estimate — it estimates the change size and prefers work it can complete cleanly within your cost ceiling.
• Risk — it down-ranks anything near sensitive paths, even within allowed labels.
• Testability — issues where passing or adding tests verifies correctness score higher than untestable ones.

Higher-scoring issues get picked first. It's the same triage a careful engineer does scanning a backlog — just done continuously and at volume.

Ambiguous Issues Get a Question, Not a Guess

If an issue is too vague to act on safely, Codowave doesn't open a bad PR. It posts a clarifying comment on the issue describing what's unclear and what it would need to proceed. You answer; it continues. This is deliberate — a wrong PR costs more review time than a good question.

You Stay in Control of Ordering

Beyond filters, you can steer the queue directly: prioritize or reorder issues, exclude specific ones, and pause selection entirely. Codowave's selection is a default you can always override, not a decision it takes away from you.