Integrations

GitHub Issues

Each GitHub issue can carry the cumulative AI cost of the work linked to it, posted as a comment on the issue and edited in place as the figure moves. Whoever is reading the ticket sees what it has cost so far without opening Lineman.

Not generally available yet. Issue cost comments sit behind the integrations feature flag while we roll them out, so the controls described below may not be visible on your account yet. Nothing here needs a new install once they are.

Setting it up

There is nothing new to connect. Issue comments reuse the Lineman GitHub App you already installed for cost attribution, so if repositories and branches are already showing spend in Lineman, the App has the access it needs.

1Open Integrations in the dashboard, then GitHub. Issue comments are managed from the same page as the App itself.
2Check which repositories the App can see. Lineman only comments on issues in repositories the App already has access to, so an issue in a repo it cannot see will never get a comment.
3If a repository is missing, change the App's repository access in GitHub, then press Sync on that page so Lineman re-discovers it.

How cost reaches an issue

Lineman links spend to an issue by reading the issue reference out of the branch name or the commit. Write it as #123, either in the branch name (fix/#123-retry-timeout) or in the commit message. Work with no reference is still costed, it is just not attached to an issue.

The # is required. A bare 123 is not matched, and that is deliberate: branch names are full of numbers that have nothing to do with issues, such as dates, versions and ticket ids from other trackers. Matching on digits alone would post someone else's cost onto whatever issue happened to share the number.

Issue numbers are per repository, not global. #123 in one repository and #123 in another are different issues. The figure on a comment is the cost for that issue in that repository, so work split across two repositories produces two comments, and neither total includes the other.
No reference, no comment. If no branch or commit ever mentioned the issue, there is nothing to attribute and Lineman leaves the issue alone. A missing comment is nearly always this, rather than a problem with the App.

One comment, edited in place

Lineman posts a single comment per issue and edits that same comment as the total changes, instead of adding a new one on every update. The thread stays readable, and the figure on screen is always the current one.

Do not edit or delete that comment. Lineman recognises its own comment by a marker it writes into the body. If the marker is changed or the comment is deleted, the next update cannot find the original and posts a second comment instead. Leave the Lineman comment alone and put your own remarks in a separate one.

Reading the number

Amounts are in US dollars, never cents, so the figure on an issue reads the same as the same figure in Cost Explorer.
The figure is cumulative. It is the total attributed to that issue so far, not the spend since the last update, so it only rises while work on the issue continues.
Only linked work counts. Work on the same problem in a branch or commit that never mentioned #123 is absent from the issue total, even though it still appears in your Cost Explorer figures. If an issue looks cheaper than it felt, check the branch names first.

Back to the GitHub integration