Semantic Search on Issues Dashboard

GitHub is expanding its semantic search capabilities to the Issues dashboard, bringing the same natural language search experience previously launched in January to a wider audience. Starting this week, the feature enters public preview, allowing developers to search for issues across multiple repositories using plain English queries rather than structured syntax.

Key Capabilities and Limitations

The semantic search on the dashboard includes several important details for users:

• Broad search scope: Search across all your repositories, though cross-repository searches are limited to your top 100 repositories
• Smart fallback: Filter-only searches and exact-match queries (like those using quotation marks) automatically use lexical search
• Easy switching: A preview banner appears on the Issues dashboard with an option to revert to classic search at any time

Additional GitHub Issues and Projects Improvements

Beyond semantic search, GitHub shipped several smaller improvements in the same release:

• Permission-aware UI: Label and milestone pickers no longer show "Create new" options to users without creation permissions
• Better loading feedback: Creating sub-issues now displays a loading state while the form loads
• Agent improvements: Fixed a bug where assigning third-party agents to issues didn't immediately trigger work—agents now start as expected
• Performance boost: GitHub Projects no longer shows item counts in the top navigation bar to improve page load times site-wide

Getting Started

Visit the Issues dashboard to see the semantic search preview banner. You can provide feedback through the GitHub Community discussions.