taken?

One question, answered before you volunteer for a GitHub issue:
is it already taken?

GitHub shows "linked a pull request" events in the issue timeline, but never in the comments. You can read every comment on an issue and still miss that someone already opened a PR for it. taken? checks the timeline, scans comments for people claiming the work, looks at assignees, reads CONTRIBUTING.md for AI contribution policies, and checks whether the repo is still active. Then it gives a verdict, with the evidence cited.

Try it live

Type any public GitHub issue below and get a real verdict, computed in your browser via GitHub's public API. No login, no install. (Public API: 60 requests/hour, one check uses about 7.)

A real console: taken's actual Python code runs in your browser (Pyodide), with live checks against GitHub's public API. Try: taken microsoft/scope#1275 · taken IBM/mcp-context-forge#5848 · taken --discover --limit 3 (live)

Install

You need Python 3.10+ and the GitHub CLI (gh), authenticated. taken? only makes read-only API calls through your own gh login. It never sees or stores tokens, and it never writes anything to GitHub.

uv tool install taken-gh
taken owner/repo#123

Or run it without installing:

uvx --from taken-gh taken owner/repo#123

Usage

taken owner/repo#123
taken https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/123

# flags
taken owner/repo#123 --json        # full findings as JSON
taken owner/repo#123 --me mylogin  # ignore your own comments
taken owner/repo --label "good first issue" --limit 10   # scan a repo
taken --discover --language python --min-stars 50        # find candidates

Exit codes: 0 means GO, 1 means TAKEN, 2 means CAUTION, 3 means something broke.

Discover mode

taken --discover hunts for contribution candidates across GitHub: raw candidates come from GitHub's issue search, then each one gets taken's full verification and only GO verdicts are ranked. Candidates are scored on the signal no aggregator filters on, maintainer responsiveness.

MCP server

taken also ships as an MCP server, so coding agents can check issues with a tool call instead of shelling out to the CLI (check_issue, scan_repo, discover_candidates). It is listed in the official MCP Registry as io.github.RogueAlg0/taken.

uvx --from taken-gh taken-mcp

How the verdict works

TAKEN wins over CAUTION, which wins over GO.

TAKEN: the issue is closed, an open PR links to it, or someone is assigned.
CAUTION: a comment says someone wants it (soft claim, they may have moved on), a linked PR was merged but the issue is still open, the repo has an AI policy to respect, or the repo looks inactive.
GO: none of the above.

The claimant scan is a heuristic over comment text, not proof. The verdict always prints its evidence so you can judge for yourself.