GitHub standards
This section covers the files around the code: the ones that tell someone arriving cold what a project is, what they are allowed to do with it, and how to send a change back.
Part of that is measured by GitHub itself. Every public repository has a community profile: GitHub looks for a set of standard files and reports a percentage.
The scorecard
Section titled “The scorecard”Synced on 23 October 2026, across 29 public repositories. From GitHub’s community profile for github.com/nerln.
| Repository | Health | Description | README | Licence | CONTRIBUTING | Code of conduct | PR template | Issue templates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
banchina | 100% | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no |
molo | 100% | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no |
claude-codex-bridge | 71% | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no |
argano | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
boa | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
capitaneria | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
dogana | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
faro | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
japepo | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
man5-surfaces | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
paranco | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
paratia | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
pensiero-profondo | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
placa | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
plancia | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
rada | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
reflip | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
scriba | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
snapchat-memories-to-photos | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
stiva | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
tamiz | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
varo | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
vedetta | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
vesta | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
vesuvius-ladder | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
wedding-invite-starter-kit | 42% | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
porto | 28% | yes | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
tratto | 28% | yes | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
mimo | 14% | no | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
Every repository in the list has a README. Without a description on GitHub: mimo. On licences: nineteen MIT, five GPL-3.0, three without a licence, two Apache-2.0.
What 42 percent means
Section titled “What 42 percent means”Most repositories sit at 42 percent. They carry a description, a README and a licence, and they are missing CONTRIBUTING, a code of conduct, an issue template and a pull request template. mimo (14 percent), porto and tratto (28 percent each) have no licence file yet, which is the one gap on that list that matters to a reader.
molo and banchina reach 100 percent because they add CONTRIBUTING, a code of conduct and a pull request template. Their issue templates are separate files under .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/, which the profile’s issue template field does not report. claude-codex-bridge reaches 71 percent by adding CONTRIBUTING and nothing else.
When a repository gets contribution files
Section titled “When a repository gets contribution files”A repository gets CONTRIBUTING when there is a real process to describe, meaning a test suite to run and a review path to follow. It gets templates when issues start arriving and I find myself answering the same questions twice. Molo went first because it has a hard boundary that a contributor could cross by accident, and that boundary needed writing down.
What ships regardless of the score
Section titled “What ships regardless of the score”Every repository is meant to carry these, whatever its percentage. Three do not have the licence file yet.
- A licence, chosen before the first public commit.
- A README section that says what the tool does not do, including the cases where the answer is a flat no.
- A list of known limitations, including things that compile but have never been run on real hardware.
- A check that would catch the claim if it were false, shipped in the repository so you can run it.
The pages under Tools go through those one project at a time.
© 2026 Eugenio Giuseppe Nerelli