taken MCP server

taken?

<!-- Static python badge: shields' pypi/pyversions reads trove classifiers, not requires-python, so it renders "missing" until a release ships with the Python classifiers below. -->

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.RogueAlg0/taken -->

taken? answers one question before you volunteer for a GitHub issue: is it already taken?

The catch it was built for: GitHub shows "linked a pull request" events in the issue timeline, but never in the comments. You can read every comment on an issue and still miss that someone already opened a PR for it. taken? checks the timeline, scans comments for people claiming the work, looks at assignees, reads CONTRIBUTING.md for AI contribution policies, and checks whether the repo is still active. Then it gives a verdict, GO, TAKEN, or CAUTION, with the evidence cited.

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer
• The GitHub CLI (gh), authenticated

taken? only makes read-only API calls through your own gh login. It never sees or stores tokens, and it never writes anything to GitHub.

Install as a tool

uv tool install taken-gh taken owner/repo#123

Or with pipx:

pipx install taken-gh taken owner/repo#123

Usage

uv run taken owner/repo#123

A full issue URL works too:

uv run taken https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/123

Useful flags:

• --json: print the full findings as JSON instead of the human summary
• --me LOGIN: ignore your own comments when scanning for claimants
• --file PATH: read targets from a file, one per line
• --limit N: scan mode checks at most N open issues per repo (default: 20)
• --label LABEL: scan mode only considers open issues carrying this label
• --no-cache: bypass the API response cache
• --clear-cache: delete the API response cache and exit
• --version, --help

Exit codes: 0 means GO, 1 means TAKEN, 2 means CAUTION, 3 means something broke (bad target, no gh, API error). With several targets the exit code is 0 when every target produced a verdict and 3 when any target failed.

Batch mode and repo scans

Give taken several targets and it prints one verdict line per target:

taken owner/repo#123 owner/repo#124 --me mylogin TAKEN owner/repo#123 assigned to: dk5488 GO owner/repo#124 no linked PRs, no assignees, no claimants, repo is active

A bare owner/repo scans the repo automatically: its open issues (most recently updated first, PRs excluded) are each checked:

taken django/django --label "good first issue" --limit 10

API responses are cached for one hour in ~/.cache/taken (override with TAKENCACHEDIR), so repeated scans stay cheap. --no-cache skips the cache; --clear-cache deletes it.

Discover mode

taken --discover finds contribution candidates across GitHub. It piggybacks on GitHub's issue search API (the same source the web aggregators use) for raw candidates, then runs taken's full verification on each one and ranks the survivors. Only GO verdicts make the list.

taken --discover --language python --min-stars 50 --limit 10 6 octocat/hello-world#42 maintainer replied; updated 1d ago; repo pushed 0d ago 4 octocat/other-repo#7 updated 3d ago; repo pushed 2d ago

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.