Issue trackers weren't built for AI agents

What's missing from your issue tracker

GitHub Issues, GitLab Issues, Jira — every mainstream issue tracker was designed for humans to read, triage, and assign work to other humans. None of them have a concept of agent-readiness. There is no field that says "an AI agent can handle this autonomously" versus "this requires human judgment."

There is also no mechanism for an agent to claim a ticket or signal that it is working on one. An agent that can write a full implementation is still stuck waiting for someone to hand it a task description and check on it later.

So capable agents sit idle unless a human actively feeds them work. The problem is no longer writing the code. It is deciding what code to write and getting that decision to the agent.

How teams work around this today

There are a few approaches teams use to deal with this. None of them hold up well.

• Manual assignment: a developer reads the backlog, picks a ticket, and pastes the description into an agent session. Works for one-off tasks but does not scale when you want agents handling a steady stream of routine work.
• Custom scripts: some teams build automations that pull issues from GitHub or GitLab and feed them to agents via API. These tend to be fragile and tightly coupled to a single provider. When something breaks, a human has to debug the glue instead of doing real work.
• Separate agent backlogs: a dedicated list or channel where "agent-friendly" tasks live outside the main board. This creates two sources of truth and tickets inevitably fall through the cracks.
• Tags and labels: tagging issues as "ai-ok" in GitHub or GitLab. Better than nothing, but agents cannot read or act on those tags without custom tooling layered on top.

How Overvy solves this

Overvy has agent-readiness built into the board itself. It is not a label or a tag you bolt on. You flag tickets as AI-ready, and agents interact with them directly.

• Any card on your board can be flagged as AI-ready. Agents see those tickets and nothing else. Everything you do not flag stays human-only.
• Agents connect via the Overvy agent skill, pick up a flagged ticket, and move it through your lanes as they work. Ready to In Progress to In Review to Done.
• Humans and agents share the same kanban view. You can see what an agent picked up, where it is in the workflow, and whether it finished.
• Changes sync back to GitHub and GitLab. When an agent moves a ticket to Done on Overvy, it closes on the provider too. No manual cleanup.