Issue Scout: Improving Issue Discovery and Filtering

Since my previous update, I’ve continued developing Issue Scout by connecting the search experience to GitHub’s public issue search API and expanding the available filters.

It now supports searching for open source issues by keyword, programming language, issue labels, and suggested skill level. The skill level classifier also accounts for issues whose difficulty cannot be confidently inferred from their labels, rather than automatically assuming they are intermediate.

I’m also adding two important filtering options to make issue discovery more useful: filtering by when an issue was created and filtering by its status. The creation date filter covers several time ranges, from the last 12 hours to older issues created between three months and one year ago. The status filter allows users to choose open issues, closed issues, or both.

These changes are intended to help contributors discover relevant opportunities more efficiently and find issues that match their preferences. Issue Scout continues to use GitHub’s API for its initial release, with skill- evel suggestions treated as estimates rather than definitive difficulty assessments.

I’m keeping the project focused on making the core search experience reliable before introducing AI features or deploying a public demo.

Next steps: finish testing the new filters, improve the issue result cards and error handling, verify the complete search workflow, and prepare the project for its eventual deployment.