find-work

name

find-work

description

Find a good gastownhall/gascity issue to work on as an external contributor. Scans open issues, classifies them into actionability tiers (grab now / good candidate / investigate / skip), and — critically — detects competing PRs and maintainer-decision gates so you don't pick an issue that's already in flight or that needs a maintainer's product/design call before any PR is realistic. Self-contained — plain gh queries you run yourself, no internal tooling. Use when you want to contribute but don't have a specific bug in mind yet.

Find Work

You want to contribute to gastownhall/gascity but don't have a specific bug in mind. This skill scans the open issues and ranks them into a contributor work-queue — and, most importantly, filters out the issues that look grabbable but aren't: ones already covered by an open PR, or ones that need a maintainer decision before any PR makes sense.

Run the gh queries yourself (or have your coding agent run them). The output is a ranked list and a single recommended pick.

1. Pull the landscape

# Open issues, richest fields first
gh issue list --repo gastownhall/gascity --state open --limit 100 \
  --json number,title,labels,assignees,milestone,createdAt,updatedAt,comments

# Open PRs (to cross-reference against issues)
gh pr list --repo gastownhall/gascity --state open --limit 100 \
  --json number,title,body,author,createdAt

Bias toward unassigned bugs at priority/p0–p1 on the current milestone — those are the highest-value, lowest-ambiguity picks for an outside contributor.

2. Competing-work detection (CRITICAL — get this right)

For every candidate you'd consider grabbing, check for a competing PR using all three methods. A single search misses PRs that reference the issue by number in the body, by title keywords, or only via GitHub's cross-reference linkage.

# a) by issue number
gh pr list --repo gastownhall/gascity --state open --search "<issue-number>"
# b) by issue title keywords
gh pr list --repo gastownhall/gascity --state open --search "<key phrases from the title>"
# c) by the issue's cross-reference timeline
gh api repos/gastownhall/gascity/issues/<number>/timeline --paginate \
  --jq '.[] | select(.source.issue.pull_request) | .source.issue.html_url'

If any method finds an open PR targeting the issue → Tier 4 (skip). Picking a contested issue wastes your time and creates merge conflicts.

3. Maintainer-decision gates (run on every Tier 1/2 candidate)

Competing-work checks catch duplicate PRs but miss issues where the fix needs a maintainer product or design decision before any PR is realistic. Apply these four blocking gates — if one fires, demote to Tier 3 (investigate, don't grab):

• DD — Design-doc conflict. Grep engdocs/design/*.md for the issue's symbols; if an Accepted/Implementing doc contradicts the issue's proposed direction, the fix needs a maintainer's call. Demote.
• AU — Author uncertainty. The issue body ends with "?" or contains phrasing like "is this a bug or", "intended behavior", "Or at least", "Is X supposed to", or proposes 2+ alternatives without committing. Demote.
• MA — Maintainer-ambivalent comment. A maintainer comment says "good point" / "we should" but gives no directive and links no PR. The direction isn't settled. Demote.
• PD — Product decision disguised as a bug. The "Expected/Actual" sections argue a product opinion ("should be lighter", "feels counter-intuitive") rather than pointing at a concrete defect. Demote.

Emit a Gates: [DD AU MA PD] line on every Tier 1/2 entry, marking which fired. The recommended pick must pass all four.

Also flag (don't demote): comment-thread scope drift — retracted repros, adjacent follow-ups, or 3+ clarifying exchanges with no maintainer commitment.

4. Classify into tiers

Tier	Meaning	Criteria
1 — GRAB NOW	Clear, unblocked, high-value	Unassigned, clear bug, current milestone, p0/p1, no competing PR, all decision gates pass
2 — GOOD CANDIDATE	Solid but needs some investigation	p1/p2 bug, fixable, no competing PR, gates pass
3 — INVESTIGATE FIRST	Unclear scope or needs a maintainer call	A decision gate fired, or scope is ambiguous
4 — SKIP	Don't grab	Assigned, covered by an open PR, post-release, or a pure design discussion

5. Output

Gas City work-queue — <date>

Open issues: <count> (by milestone / priority)

Tier 1 — GRAB NOW
  #<n> <title>  [p<x>, milestone]  Gates: [....]  — <one-line why it's a clean pick>
Tier 2 — GOOD CANDIDATE
  #<n> <title>  [p<x>]  Gates: [....]  — <what to investigate first>
Tier 3 — INVESTIGATE FIRST
  #<n> <title>  — gate fired: <DD/AU/MA/PD + why>
Tier 4 — SKIP
  #<n> <title>  — <covered by PR #m / assigned / design discussion>

Recommended next pick: #<n> — <rationale; confirm it passes all four gates>

6. Hand off to planning

Once you've picked an issue, plan the PR with plan-implementation — it runs the competing-PR and architectural-refactor gates again at code-time (the landscape may have changed), maps blast radius, and aligns the plan to repo conventions before you write code.

When to re-run

• After main gets new merges (the landscape shifts).
• After you ship a PR and want the next pick.
• Periodically, to catch newly filed issues.