ISSUES.md Alternative: In-Repo Issue Tracking for AI Coding Agents
If you use Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf on a real project, you've probably already reinvented ISSUES.md. Nobody standardized it, but it spread anyway, because it solves a real problem: give the agent a work list it can read without a network call, and a place to write back what it fixed. No server, no account, no context switch out of the editor. It lives and dies with the commit history like everything else in the repo.
It also breaks down. Not immediately — at five issues, a hand-written markdown list is completely fine. The trouble starts around fifty.