is-it-claimed

Check whether a GitHub issue is already being worked on — before you write the patch.

$ is-it-claimed owner/repo#606
CLAIMED (high confidence)
  owner/repo#606  serve backend hand-rolls its own prompt

  ! @contributor has an OPEN PR for this — fix: apply the model's chat template
    https://github.com/owner/repo/pull/607

No dependencies. Python 3.9+.

Why

An issue with no assignee and no comments looks free. It often isn't.

This tool exists because of a specific afternoon: an issue was filed at 16:27, a pull request fixing it was opened 50 seconds later, and a second contributor — who had checked the issue for a claim and found none — started the same work at 16:52 and finished it. Two people wrote the same patch, and a maintainer had to spend their time choosing between them.

Nothing was done wrong. The claim simply wasn't anywhere the second contributor looked. GitHub records a referencing PR in the issue's timeline, not in its comments, so gh issue view does not show it and neither does the web page's comment thread.

is-it-claimed looks in all four places a claim actually hides.

Install

pip install is-it-claimed
# or, without installing:
uvx is-it-claimed owner/repo#123

Use

is-it-claimed owner/repo#123
is-it-claimed https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/123
is-it-claimed owner/repo#123 --forks     # also scan forks for a matching branch
is-it-claimed owner/repo#123 --json      # machine-readable

Exit codes make it scriptable — 0 available, 1 claimed, 2 error:

is-it-claimed "$ISSUE" || { echo "someone is already on it"; exit 1; }

What it checks

Weights add up into a confidence level, because these signals are not equal. A fork branch alone is a hint; someone may have abandoned it months ago. An open PR is as close to certain as this gets.

Claim phrases are matched conservatively. "Can I work on this?" is a question, not a claim, and treating it as one would tell you an issue is taken when it is merely being discussed.

Authentication

Optional, but recommended — unauthenticated GitHub allows 60 requests/hour, and --forks can spend that on one check.

The token is picked up from GITHUB_TOKEN, GH_TOKEN, or the credentials the gh CLI already stores, so if you have gh auth login there is nothing to do.

Partial results

If one check fails — rate limit, a deleted fork — the others still run and the failure is reported:

AVAILABLE
  no claim found in: assignee, comments
  ? could not check fork branches: refused (403)

A definitive answer already found in the timeline is not thrown away because a later, weaker check failed.

Limits

• A claim made somewhere else entirely — Discord, a mailing list, a maintainer's head — is invisible here. AVAILABLE means "no public signal", not "nobody is working on it".
• --forks scans the 30 most recently pushed forks by default. A very popular repository has more.
• Claim-phrase matching is English-only.

Licence

MIT