PostHog Code Inbox research tasks

Research tasks

When a signal, like an Error Tracking exception or a GitHub issue, arrives, an agent investigates automatically.

How Inbox determines priority

Inbox doesn't rank by error frequency. It looks at three things:

Code importance. Is the issue in a hot path like checkout, signup, or billing?
User impact. How many users are affected, and are they on a paid plan?
Severity. Is the product broken for these users, or is it a minor UX issue?

Triage workflow

The queue is processed in this order:

P0 and P1: If a report is marked Actionable, an agent has usually already opened a pull request.
Actionable items: After P0 and P1, the agent will work through the actionable items in the queue.
Items needing research: If a report isn't actionable yet, and there are no actionable items left, the agent will trigger a research task.

Root cause analysis

The agent pairs the production signal with codebase access to find the root cause. For example, it sees a DoesNotExist error in production and points to the exact line in billing_manager.py where a database query is missing a null check.

Assign owners

Inbox suggests reviewers and owners for each report from two signals:

Git blame. Who recently touched the affected lines.
Historical ownership. Who has resolved similar issues in this part of the codebase.