Backend
Somebody asked for help. Nobody came.
Yann VR Dev.to (EN Zone)
2 views
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition
What I Built
Andrea has been waiting 174 days for someone to reply to his issue. He asked nicely. He labelled it help wanted. Someone who knows Rust could answer him tonight in ten minutes.
They just don't know he asked.
There are 26,034 issues like his right now. People haven't stopped caring about open source. The ask and the person who could answer it simply never meet.
unanswered introduces them.
Tell it what you're good at. It finds the maintainers you could genuinely help, explains in plain words what each one needs, and drafts an opening line, so the first step isn't the hard one.
Then it hands you the pen. You write the reply. You send it. Your name, your words. All the app did was make the introduction.
Demo
unanswered.hyperdrift.io
Try one, no typing needed:
React and TypeScript
Python and Rust
Go and Java
Code
hyperdrift-io
/
unanswered
Open-source maintainers asked for help and nobody replied. Find the ones you can answer, with your first reply drafted by Gemini.
unanswered
Somebody asked for help. Nobody came.
Every day a maintainer labels an issue help wanted and waits. Weeks pass. The
person who could have answered never saw it. This finds those asks, matches
them to what you know, and drafts your first reply, so giving an hour to open
source starts with a comment instead of an evening of searching.
Live: unanswered.hyperdrift.io
Built in a weekend for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition.
What it does
GitHub search: open help wanted issues, no assignee, zero comments, three
weeks to a year old, most recently touched first, in the languages you
named. Only asks opened by the repo's owner, a member or a collaborator
count: "a maintainer asked" is literally true. One ask per repo, longest
wait first. (No stars: filter: issue search does not support it and
GitHub silently matches the number against the issue number instead. Every…
View on GitHub
How I Built It
Two decisions carry it.
Only real asks count. GitHub tells you who opened an issue: the repo's owner, a member, a collaborator. Keep those, add three weeks of silence and zero replies, and every result is a real person who genuinely asked.
Gemini reads so you don't have to guess. An issue is written in someone else's private language. Gemini turns it into one plain sentence about what they need, says why it fits you, and drafts a reply that offers one concrete next step and no promises. That is the part a search box can never do.
Engineering notes
For anyone using GitHub issue search: stars: is not a supported qualifier there, and GitHub matches the number against the issue number instead of rejecting it. stars:>20 returns only issues numbered 20. Repo quality has to come from who asked and how recently the issue was touched.
Rate limits as design. GitHub's secondary limit trips on two concurrent searches, so searches run one at a time behind a lock, cache for thirty minutes, and eight languages warm at boot. The three example searches cache for a day.
Gemini in production. 3.6 Flash returns a thought-signature part before the text part, so read every non-thought part. The model is reached through Vertex AI with a service-account token minted in about forty lines of node:crypto; if that door shuts, the page still shows the maintainers, unranked, with an honest line.
Stack. Waku (React Server Components), two typed server functions, one client island, pure cascading CSS, plain fetch. Seven dependencies, no database, no accounts. An MCP server exposes the same two acts for Claude or ChatGPT.
Prize Categories
Best Use of Google AI
Read original: https://dev.to/yannvr/somebody-asked-for-help-nobody-came-5c7i
← Previous
Building Adaptive AI Agents
Next →
From Messy CSV to Clean Dashboard: What I Learned Building My First Power BI + Google Analytics Dashboard (Part 1)
Related
My leaderboard site updates itself while I sleep — pure-stdlib Python, GitHub Actions, zero servers
Backend
1
Dev.to (EN Zone)
Putting Authelia in front of my whole homelab: what worked, what didn't, and the £0 lesson that nearly undid all of it
Backend
3
DEV Community
AI Solutions for Managing Large Codebases: 2026 Guide
Backend
5
DEV Community
Legacy System Modernization Without the Rewrite
Backend
5
DEV Community
Comments0
No comments yet — be the first