Project V2: addProjectV2ItemById succeeds but items never persist — account-wide, affects both API and UI

[Venture-Orient]

Problem

Cannot add ANY new items to any Project V2 board on my account. The addProjectV2ItemById GraphQL mutation returns success, but items never appear in the project's items list or the board UI. Existing items (added weeks ago) still work fine.

This affects both the API and the web UI — items appear briefly in the UI then vanish on refresh.

Account Details

• Personal account (not org), GitHub Free plan
• Private repository
• Project Welcome to GitHub product feedback #1 with 28 existing items (working)
• All project workflows disabled (tested with and without)

Evidence

1. Mutation succeeds but items list unchanged

# This succeeds and returns an item ID:
mutation {
  addProjectV2ItemById(input: {
    projectId: "PVT_kwHODV8Ajs4BQSPC"
    contentId: "I_kwDORWXr9c7vNbTT"
  }) { item { id } }
}
# Returns: {"item": {"id": "PVTI_lAHODV8Ajs4BQSPCzgmgSGg"}}

# But the items list never includes it:
query {
  user(login: "Venture-Orient") {
    projectV2(number: 1) {
      items(first: 50) { totalCount }
    }
  }
}
# totalCount stays at 28 — never increments

2. Item node exists but is invisible to the project

# Direct node query FINDS the item:
query { node(id: "PVTI_lAHODV8Ajs4BQSPCzgmgSGg") {
  ... on ProjectV2Item { id isArchived content { ... on Issue { number } } }
}}
# Returns: isArchived=false, number=33, exists on the project

# Issue side also confirms association:
gh issue view 33 --json projectItems
# Shows: [{"status": {"name": "Todo"}, "title": "Venture Orient"}]

3. Brand new project board also fails

Created a fresh project, added 29 issues via mutation — all returned success. totalCount: 0. The problem is account-wide, not specific to one project.

4. Issue timeline confirms add/vanish cycle

added_to_project_v2      (Venture-Orient, 20:57:44)
project_v2_item_status_changed (github-project-automation[bot], 20:57:46)
... item vanishes from items list and UI ...

This cycle repeated 5+ times across API and UI attempts.

5. Web UI behavior

Clicking "+ Add item" → searching for issue → adding it → item appears briefly in the column → disappears on the next render/refresh.

What I've Ruled Out

• Not an item limit — project has 28 items, limit is 1,200+ (50,000 in preview)
• Not a workflow issue — all project workflows disabled, same behavior
• Not an issue body size problem — tested with a 1-line body, same result
• Not a specific issue problem — tested with multiple issues including a brand new test issue
• Not a token scope issue — token has project scope, and the UI (no token) also fails
• Not a repository issue — repo is properly linked to the project

Impact

• Cannot add new issues to project board
• Lost a previously-working item (Allow any emoji when creating the spotlight (including different skin tones) #32) after removing and trying to re-add it
• Project management workflow blocked

Expected Behavior

Items added via addProjectV2ItemById or the UI should appear in projectV2.items and remain visible on the board.

Environment

• GitHub Free plan, personal account
• Private repository
• Tested via gh CLI v2.45.0 and web UI
• Date: March 2, 2026

[kpanko-island]

Looks similar to me: #188486

[Venture-Orient]

Identical issue reported in #188486 by another user on the same day (March 2, 2026) — same symptoms with an org project and a PR instead of a personal project and issues. Appears to be a platform-wide regression in the project items indexing layer, not account-specific.

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[Venture-Orient]

Resolved — the bug self-resolved approximately 1.5 hours after first occurrence. All items (including ghost items from multiple add attempts) are now visible on the board with correct field values. No action taken on our end — it cleared on its own.

Likely related to the PR incident that was active at the same time.

[cybulak]

Heads up that this one seems to be back. Hit exactly the same thing on my personal Project V2 today (April 20, 2026), roughly 7 weeks after your original report.

Setup is a single-user personal project with one private repo linked, nothing exotic. All 7 built-in workflows enabled including "Auto-add to project".

What triggered it, as far as I can tell: during a troubleshooting session I ran a bunch of GraphQL mutations on the same handful of issues in about a 30 minute window. Added an issue via addProjectV2ItemById, deleted it, re-added it, closed the issue, created a duplicate issue, added that one, closed it again, created a third one, and finally added it via the web UI sidebar. Standard stuff, nothing unusual about any individual step.

Every single mutation returned success with a fresh item ID. But every single item created during that 30 minute window has stayed invisible in project.items(first: 100). Items created before the window show up fine. Items created after the window, about an hour later through the web UI, also show up fine. Just that specific batch is stuck.

The odd part is that the data is clearly there. When I query it from the issue side, repository.issue(N).projectItems returns the item with isArchived false and the correct project id. But when I query the same project from the other direction, project.items(first: 100), totalCount does not increment and the item is missing from the node list. So it is not a pagination thing, it is not an archived thing, the row just never lands in the inverse index.

Workarounds I tried that did not help:

• Multiple rounds of deleteProjectV2Item plus addProjectV2ItemById. Same result every time, new item ID, still invisible.
• Toggling a label on the issue to wake up the "Auto-add to project" workflow. Workflow silently does nothing, even though the API reports it as enabled.
• Closing the affected issue and creating a fresh one with identical title, body and labels. The fresh issue also becomes invisible if I touch it during the affected window.
• Waiting. Your case self-resolved after about 90 minutes, mine is past 3 hours with no change.

One thing that did help, partially: opening the default Table view in the web UI and manually clicking "+ Add item" on the affected issue made it show up in that one view. But the API still does not see it from the project side, so any automation depending on project.items stays broken.

My best guess is a stuck materialization for a specific batch of items rather than something breaking at mutation time. The write path works, it's the inverse index that is not catching those rows, and the usual eventual-consistency path is not kicking in.

Happy to share API response JSON or screenshots if someone on the team wants to look.

[TeaShaman-cyber]

Fresh independent reproduction on 2026-09-23. This appears to be the same fingerprint, and in our case it affects ordinary issues, not PRs.

Environment:

• user-owned Projects v2 project;
• source issues are in a normal GitHub repository;
• observed through both gh project ... and direct GraphQL.

What we observed:

1. addProjectV2ItemById succeeds and returns a PVTI_... item ID.
2. Re-running gh project item-add <project> --owner <owner> --url <issue-url> --format json resolves to the same item ID, so this is not a duplicate-add artifact.
3. Direct node(id: <PVTI_...>) readback returns a ProjectV2Item with isArchived: false, the expected project, the expected issue content, and the field values we set.
4. The issue-side projectItems connection also contains that same Project membership and persisted Status/Priority/Area/Maturity values.
5. But ProjectV2.items(first:100) omits the new item(s), and totalCount remains on the old set.
6. gh project item-list ... --limit 100 --format json shows the same stale project-centric view.

In the current reproducible state we have:

• 27 active memberships visible via Issue/PR projectItems reverse lookup;
• 8 items visible through the Project's items connection;
• 19 issue items therefore missing only from the Project-centric connection.

We added a read-only verifier that compares those two independent views. On the live project it returns exactly 19 findings, all PROJECT_CONNECTION_MISSING_ITEM; there are no other lifecycle-drift finding classes in that run.

Public reproduction/verification code and evidence:

• verifier merged in TeaShaman-cyber/marcopolo-cookbook PR #103: qa: add deterministic MarcoPolo roadmap verifier TeaShaman-cyber/marcopolo-cookbook#103
• tracking/acceptance evidence: QA: export and verify the MarcoPolo roadmap graph TeaShaman-cyber/marcopolo-cookbook#54
• merged commit: 974088cff24b54e23e40ea0ca80b7ddd59fec502

Minimal comparison shape:

# Project-centric view: missing the item(s)
user(login: "<owner>") {
  projectV2(number: <N>) {
    items(first: 100) { totalCount nodes { id } }
  }
}

# Issue-centric reverse membership: item is present
repository(owner: "<owner>", name: "<repo>") {
  issue(number: <issue>) {
    projectItems(first: 20) {
      nodes { id isArchived project { number } }
    }
  }
}

The discrepancy persisted well beyond a single request/refresh cycle. We are treating the Project listing surface as degraded and not deleting/re-adding the items, since the item nodes and reverse memberships already prove they exist.

Happy to provide a smaller sanitized snapshot if useful.

[lewisblackwood]

Suspect it's the Projects outage: https://www.githubstatus.com/

We are seeing recovery for Projects. Users may experience stale search results for Projects while indexing catches up.

[juntjtang18]

Same fingerprint on 2026-09-23, org-owned Projects V2, ordinary issues (not PRs). Matches this thread and the TeaShaman-cyber comment from earlier today.

Environment

• Organization project: ziyu-interns-2025Fall project 1 (Ziyutec aiERP), node PVT_kwDODbZFVc4BjmMN
• Repo: ziyu-interns-2025Fall/aem_pro
• Last healthy add: issue #254 (2026-09-21) — github-project-automation added it and it is in project.items
• Broken from #255 onward (2026-09-23)

What we tried (all “succeed”, none appear on the board)

1. gh issue create only — wait for built-in auto-add (github-project-automation creates a PVTI_… ~3s later)
2. Manual issue create in the web UI, then set Projects on the issue (#261)
3. GraphQL addProjectV2ItemById, gh project item-add, REST POST /orgs/.../projectsV2/.../items
4. Dropping the view filter (label:UserStory removed; unfiltered Board view still empty for new cards)

Observed split (same as March / April / today)

Issue #261 (created 2026-09-23T18:14:07Z, project set by the author):

• repository.issue(261).projectItems has PVTI_lADODbZFVc4BjmMNzg8ZAac
  • creator: github-project-automation
  • createdAt: 2026-09-23T18:14:09Z
  • isArchived: false
  • Status Todo is set
• Direct node(id: PVTI_…) returns the item
• organization.projectV2(number: 1).items.totalCount stays 209
• gh project item-list 1 --owner ziyu-interns-2025Fall --limit 300 lists 209 items, max issue #254, has261 == false
• Every board view hides the card, including Board (empty filter)

Earlier ghosts on the same project (#255, #256, #259, #260) had the same shape. Deleting those issues and recreating did not increment totalCount. Delete + re-add of the card created extra item IDs that still never entered project.items.

What this is not

• Not a gh project item-list default --limit 30 miss (--limit 300, GraphQL pagination, totalCount all agree on 209)
• Not an item-cap (209 ≪ 50,000)
• Not view filters / missing UserStory label / missing Iteration
• Not archived items
• Not only the API: the issue-page Project picker and auto-add bot produce the same ghost

We are not deleting or re-adding further items. The write path and the issue-side reverse membership work; the project-centric index does not accept anything after #254.

Happy to share GraphQL JSON if useful.