Greenlight

Greenlight is the pre-flight and coordination layer for open-source contribution: the software that stands between an outside contributor (increasingly an AI agent) and the maintainers of a public repo, and answers the questions no other tool answers. Can I contribute here at all? Is this issue secretly taken? What are the house rules? Who else is racing me? And for maintainers: who is flooding my queue, and what is safe to merge?

Quickstart

npx @reneturcios/greenlight check <issue-url>

Why this layer exists

Follow the venture money and you will see where it is not going. Cognition (Devin) raised about $2B at a $48B valuation, and Factory raised $200M at a $5B valuation, to run autonomous coding agents inside enterprises' own repos. CodeRabbit raised $88M (valued near $550M), Graphite raised a $52M Series B before being acquired by Cursor, and Greptile raised a $25M Series A, all reviewing a team's own pull requests. OpenHands is an agent runtime. Every funded player assumes you are inside the org.

Nobody owns the boundary. No VC-backed tool answers the outside contributor's questions: can I contribute here, is this issue secretly taken, what are this repo's gates and AI policies, who else is racing me. And no VC-backed tool answers the maintainer's questions: which of these 30 open PRs are duplicates, who is claiming what, which claims have gone stale, which agent-written PRs are safe to merge. Greenlight is that layer, built from running real contribution campaigns through it every week.

The problem

AI made code cheap. Contribution coordination is now the bottleneck, and it breaks in specific, repeatable ways:

• Hidden competition. Issue list views lie. In a hand-vetted focus session on usebruno/bruno, 6 of 7 promising issues were secretly taken by PRs visible only in the issues' timelines, not in the list view or search results. You can spend a weekend on work that was already done.
• Gates and bans. Greenlight's own Agent Policy Index now tracks 505 repos: 127 of them (25%) carry contribution gates, and 19 ban agent contributions outright. Whole repos (nuxt, uv, Gradio, Activepieces) have closed their doors to outside PRs entirely. Nobody told you; it was in AGENTS.md.
• Duplicate AI PRs. When several contributors (human or agent) race the same issue, maintainers get three overlapping PRs and no way to arbitrate. GitHub has no claim system, only comments.
• House rules everywhere. CLAs, DCO sign-off, changesets, commit formats, assignment requests. Every repo invents its own, hides them in different files, and rejects your PR on the technicality.

These are coordination problems, not coding problems. The code agents keep getting better; the boundary keeps getting messier. Greenlight works the boundary.

What Greenlight does

Three layers, from decide to solve to coordinate:

• Decide. check reads an issue, its comments, linked and mentioned PRs (timeline plus search plus comment references), and the repo's rules, then answers in plain words: GO, RISKY,

... View full README on GitHub