GitHub Research

Explore existing GitHub repositories before building something yourself. This plugin is focused exclusively on research and discovery — it does not perform any GitHub write operations. Its job is to answer questions like:

• “Does a tool for this already exist before I start writing one?”
• “Is there a well-maintained project we could fork or integrate instead of building from scratch?”
• “What are the most popular and actively maintained options for X?”

All skills use the gh CLI (and gh api for advanced queries) and pay careful attention to three signals:

1. Stars — popularity as a rough quality proxy
2. Last update — especially critical for AI/ML projects where 6+ months of inactivity often means the project is dead
3. Maintenance health — issue response cadence, open-issue ratio, CI presence, tests, docs, license

Skills

• search-repos — general repo search by topic or keyword. Returns ranked candidates with stars, last-updated, open-issue count, license, and primary language.
• search-ai-tools — AI/ML-specific search that treats recency as equally important to stars. Flags stale projects.
• evaluate-candidates — deep dive on 2–5 candidate repos: README summary, tests/CI presence, contributor count, commit cadence, open-issue ratio, release history.
• find-alternatives — given a known project, find similar or competing projects on GitHub.
• document-findings — write research results into a planning/ folder in the current repo, stamped with the research date and the exact gh queries used so findings are reproducible.

Cross-cutting principles

• Always report: stars, last push/commit date, open issues, license, primary language.
• For AI/ML topics, reject or flag anything not updated in the last 6 months.
• Prefer well-maintained projects over popular-but-abandoned ones.
• When documenting to a repo’s planning/ folder, always stamp with the research date (YYYY-MM-DD) because the tooling landscape evolves quickly — today’s top result may be irrelevant in six months.

Installation

/plugin install github-research@danielrosehill

Requires the gh CLI installed and authenticated (gh auth status).

License

MIT