Collaboration with Proof

Separately from the issue index, we partner with Proof on free audits for open source maintainers.

A collaboration with Proof · 1 public repo per week

Are you an open source maintainer? We can help your project.

Completely free for open source repositories.

Proof turns your repository into a graph of requirements that humans and agents can both use. It finds as many bugs as it can, and gives you the tools to triage GitHub issues and pull requests from contributors — including community bug reports and security reports.

Apply free for OSS

For maintainers

Get your labeled issues in front of contributors

Big, famous projects are closing contribution queues. Smaller projects still have someone on the other side — and those are the ones Help Wanted is for.

We index public GitHub issues labeled for help from projects that actually want contributors. Right now that is about 655,134 issues across 97,389 projects. Most developers will never hear most of those names — and that is fine. A dependency you already use, a small tool, or a one-person repo can matter more than star count if your time has a visible effect.

There is nothing to install and no sign-up for your project. Read more on why helping your open-source neighbour first beats fighting the famous-project queue.

What you need to do

  1. 1. Keep the repository public

    We only see issues from public GitHub repositories. Private repos and internal orgs are out of scope.

  2. 2. Label open issues for help

    Our crawlers search GitHub for open issues with these exact labels:

    • good first issue
    • help wanted

    Use those label names (with spaces). Issues must be open. Closed or unlabeled issues will not show up. Hyphenated variants like good-first-issue are not what the search currently queries — prefer the standard GitHub labels above.

  3. 3. Wait for the next crawl

    Background workers periodically search GitHub for newly updated labeled issues, store them in our database, fetch repository metadata, and run AI summarization. Fresh labels usually appear after the next fetch cycle — there is no manual submit form.

How we find and display issues

  • GitHub search. Workers call the GitHub Issues Search API for label:"good first issue" and label:"help wanted", limited to open issues, sorted by recently updated.
  • Deduping and repo data. Matching issues are stored and linked to their repositories (language, stars, description, topics) so the Explore feed can filter and show project context.
  • AI summaries. A separate LLM worker (Google Gemini) writes a short summary and a difficulty score (1–5) for issues when processing succeeds. Cards show that summary with an “AI summary” label when available — never a second invented description field.
  • Filters on the site. Contributors can filter by language, minimum stars, category/subcategory (from repo LLM classification), and difficulty. Default Explore view emphasizes repos with at least some stars so brand-new empty shells are less prominent.
  • No bounties or accounts. Help Wanted does not host payouts, claim locks, or maintainer dashboards. Contributors open the issue on GitHub and work with you there.

Pipeline source: github.com/buger/helpwanted.dev (workers under workers/).

Struggling with contribution inflow or code quality?

If you are an open source maintainer dealing with too many patches, AI-generated noise, or review load — we can help. That is what the Proof collaboration above is for: free audits for OSS maintainers. Or just send a note.

Looking for issues to work on instead? Explore the feed.