Issue triage

Triage is deciding what not to do. A list where everything is important is a list that has not been triaged, and it produces the same outcome as no list at all: work chosen by whatever is loudest or most recent.

Two things make triage useful, and both are uncomfortable:

• Something must be ranked last.
• Something must be closed without being fixed.

If neither happens, you have sorted, not triaged.

1. Get the real list

Gather everything in scope and de-duplicate. Duplicates are not noise — the count is a signal about how often something is hit, so merge them and record the multiplier rather than deleting.

Done when: one list, no duplicates, each entry with its hit count.