[471402921]

Problem

Two noise sources show up as soon as a repo has more than one agent-facing workflow. Both are currently all-or-nothing.

1. Every trusted comment wakes the assignee. hasTrustedGitHubCommentRecords() treats any comment from a trusted author as a reason to roll the issue back to todo and wake the agent. On a shared repo, human-to-human discussion therefore keeps waking an agent that was never addressed. Teams that only want the agent on explicit hand-off end up either muting the plugin or building their own trigger outside it.

2. Every open issue is imported. listRepositoryIssuesForImport() takes state: "open" and only filters by author (ignoredIssueAuthorUsernames, default ["renovate"]). A repo with a real backlog mirrors all of it into Paperclip, so the agent's task board is mostly work it was never asked to do. A label is the natural opt-in marker, and it is already how many teams stage work.

Solution

Two new advanced settings, both empty by default = existing behaviour:

Setting	Empty (default)	Non-empty
triggerHandles	every trusted comment counts	only comments mentioning one of the handles count
requiredLabels	every open issue is imported	only issues carrying at least one of the labels are imported

triggerHandles

• Read/write in the UI as a list (one per line / comma separated), @ prefix optional, case-insensitive.
• Matching uses a real boundary: @soulpal001-morty does not match @soulpal001-morty2 or someone@handle.example. Handles may contain -, so \b is replaced by an explicit terminator.
• The gate sits at the single convergence point hasTrustedGitHubCommentRecords(), so it covers issue comments, linked-PR top-level comments and PR review threads in one place. Wake behaviour needed no change: it is already driven by the same "is there a trusted new comment" result.
• Comments that do not mention a handle are still consumed (lastSeenCommentCount advances), so they are not re-evaluated on every sync.
• Unparseable handles are kept rather than dropped: dropping would silently disable the filter and restore "wake on everything", which fails open.

requiredLabels

• Split on commas/semicolons/newlines only — not on spaces, because GitHub labels routinely contain spaces (good first issue).
• Applied only to the new-import candidate set. Issues already in the import registry keep syncing (status, comments, linked PRs) even when they carry none of the labels, so adding a filter later never freezes or deletes existing bindings. A never-imported issue without the label is skipped, including manual sync of that issue — documented in README/SPEC.

Backward compatibility

No migration needed: missing keys normalise to [], and [] is a no-op in both filters. The two keys always appear in settings.registration (so callers don't need ?? []); eight existing assertions were updated accordingly.

Tests

New pure module src/sync-filters.ts plus coverage in tests/sync-filters.spec.ts (12), tests/issue-interactions-integration.spec.ts (5) and tests/plugin.spec.ts (mention gating for issue and PR comments, label-filter e2e).

pnpm typecheck   # 0
pnpm test        # 384 pass / 0 fail  (19 new)
pnpm build       # ok

Open questions for the maintainer

1. Naming — repo style is ignoredIssueAuthorUsernames; would you prefer commentTriggerHandles / requiredIssueLabels? Renaming is a key + 3 call sites.
2. Defaults — should mention-gating ever become the default? That is breaking, so I left it opt-in.
3. PR review threads — currently gated by mentions like any other comment. If review comments should always count, it is a one-line exemption.
4. Code blocks — @handle inside a fenced block or quote still counts (GitHub itself does not notify for those). Excluding them needs markdown parsing; I chose the simpler "may wake once too often" behaviour.