Gh before you contribute

Por qué existe

gh-before-you-contribute

A read-only GitHub CLI extension and GitHub Action that checks the two questions worth asking before you write a line of code for someone else's project: Does this project accept AI-assisted contributions, and on what terms? Is anyone already working on this issue?

Both checks are one command. They read evidence from GitHub instead of guessing, and they exist because getting either one wrong wastes a maintainer's afternoon. Quick start

Install the extension:

Audit a repository, optionally including an issue:

The complete report includes the policy sources, deciding phrases, linked pull requests, claims of active work, and the repository's final READY, REVIEW, or BLOCKED state. Use JSON for automation:

--strict exits with status 1 for a documented prohibition or a taken issue. Invalid input, a missing dependency, or an API failure exits with status 2. Structured evidence

Successful JSON reports use the checked-in schema/audit-v1.schema.json contract and include schemaVersion: 1. The original policy.report and issue.report strings remain present throughout the 1.x series, but automation no longer needs to parse them:

Policy evidence is source-attributed: policy.sources identifies the organisation or repository document by path and URL. policy.matches identifies the typed rule, its effect, its source, and a deciding excerpt limited to 240 characters. policy.constraints keeps rules such as NOAICREDIT separate from the stable policy verdict. policy.manualReview records a linked homepage that the read-only GitHub API audit did not fetch. For NO-DOCS, sources and matches are empty while this reason remains explicit.

Issue signals record why work is unavailable or needs review:

· Signal · Strength · Effect on the current verdict ·

· closed issue, assignment, linked open PR, explicit work claim · decisive · TAKEN · · unlinked PR text-search match · advisory · REVIEW · · another open PR by the issue author · context · printed for review; not decisive ·

Claim excerpts are limited to 180 characters. Structured output has no raw document, issue-body, or comment-body fields; it emits only the bounded matching excerpts. A short source can fit entirely inside that bound, so treat reports from private repositories as sensitive. API failures still exit with status 2 and, in JSON mode, return an error object instead of a partial audit. The underlying checks

The extension preserves two focused commands in bin/ for users who want to run only one check:

ai-policy — where the rules actually live

Projects publish their position on AI-assisted contributions in four different places, and the one people check is usually not the one that matters.

Pallets' prohibition is not in the Click repository. It is in pallets/.github, the organisation-wide defaults repo, and on the project website. Reading pallets/click/CONTRIBUTING and finding nothing tells you nothing.

So the script reads, in order: /.github — CONTRIBUTING.md, AIPOLICY.md,…