Finding a good open-source issue to contribute to is actually much harder than it may seem.

When I started contributing to open source, I realized that writing the actual code change was often not the hardest part. The harder part was deciding whether an issue was really worth working on:

• Is the repository still active?
• Is the issue still relevant?
• Has it already been assigned to someone?
• Is there too much discussion already?
• Is it actually beginner-friendly, or does it only look beginner-friendly because it has a good first issue label?

So I built oss-issue-scout, a small CLI tool that helps developers find GitHub issues worth contributing to.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/Yong-yuan-X/oss-issue-scout

The tool searches GitHub issues and ranks them based on signals such as repository activity, issue freshness, labels, comment count, and contribution suitability.

Example usage:

oss-issue-scout search --language python --label "good first issue" --limit 10

The goal of this project is not to randomly find issues with the good first issue label, but to help contributors discover issues that are actually useful, approachable, and worth spending time on.

I’m also continuing to improve the explainability of the scoring, so the tool can show not only the score, but also why an issue is recommended and what risks to watch out for.

The project is still in an early stage, and feedback is very welcome.

If you find the project useful, I’d also really appreciate a GitHub star ⭐.