MCP has no way to list an epic's child items

Problem

Agents using the GitLab MCP server can't see what's under an epic. A common request, such as "what's the status of the issues in this epic?", needs the epic's child items, and no tool returns them.

  • get_work_item returns a work item's parent, but not its children. Its include option covers notes and related merge requests only.
  • list_work_items has no parent filter.
  • link_work_items handles related and blocking links, not the parent and child hierarchy.

Agents fall back to the API or CLI for this, or can't answer the question.

Proposal

  1. Add a children option to get_work_item's include, returning each child's compact fields (ID, IID, title, state, type, reference, web URL), paginated like the other facets.
  2. Add a parent_id filter to list_work_items, so agents can combine "children of this epic" with the existing filters for state, labels and assignees.

Either one closes the gap. The filter on list_work_items is the more flexible of the two.

Open questions for engineering

  • Whether to return direct children only, or offer a way to include all descendants.
  • How to handle children the user can't see, for example confidential items in other projects.