josifb/whichlib

The dependency picker for coding agents. Ask which library to use and get a
scored, verified answer instead of a guess.
whichlib is an MCP server with three tools (recommend_repos,
compare_repos, trending_repos) and a free dashboard, Fresh Repos, that
shows the most-starred GitHub repositories created in the last day, week and
month. Every repository gets a transparent 0–100 score from momentum,
maintenance, adoption (stars, forks, npm and PyPI downloads) and license,
plus a one-line verdict.
**For teams (waitlist):** alerts when a dependency your repos use goes stale,
and rules your team's coding agents must follow when they add one. Add a 👍
to the waitlist issue; at 20
signups it gets built. whichlib itself stays free.
Quick start
Agents: see MCP server below for the one-line install.
Dashboard: open whichlib.com/repos. The page
calls the GitHub Search API straight from your browser. No account.
Optional: paste a GitHub token under **Settings** on the page to raise the
API limit from 10 to 30 requests per minute. A fine-grained token with no
permissions is enough. It stays in your browser's local storage.
What you get
- Three tabs: **Today**, **This week**, **This month**. Each lists the 100
most-starred repos created in that window.
- Sort by any column: stars, stars per day, forks, open issues, created date,
last push, language, license or name. Click again to reverse.
- Filter by language (17 languages) or by free text over name, description
and topics.
- The rank column always shows the stars rank, so after sorting by forks you
still see where a repo stands.
- Results are cached in the browser for 60 minutes per tab and language.
- Light and dark themes follow your system setting.
How the numbers are defined
- **Trending** here means "created in the period, ranked by stars". That is
what the GitHub Search API supports. GitHub's own trending page ranks by
stars gained in the period, which has no public API. The nightly snapshots
in this repo will make that possible later.
- **Downloads** do not exist for repositories on GitHub, only for release
files. Forks are shown as the nearest public signal.
- **Stars/day** is stars divided by the repo's age, floored at one hour.
Score
Every repo gets a score from 0 to 100, a tier and a one-line verdict. The
breakdown is always returned so a person or an agent can see why. The same
file, whichlib/lib/score.js, runs in the dashboard and in Node, so
the two can never disagree.
| Part | Weight | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| Momentum | 40% | Stars gained over the last 7 days from our daily star counts (top 1,000 repos per language plus new trending repos). Without history, stars per day since creation times 7, with age floored at one day, scaled by the npm/PyPI download trend when known (last week against the three weeks before, clamped to 0.5–2x). Log scale: 50 a week is already good, 5,000 is the max. |
| Maintenance | 25% | Days since last push: full marks up to 30 days, zero at 365, linear between. Minus 0.2 when open issues exceed a tenth of the stars. Stability guard: a repo with 10k+ stars or 100k+ weekly downloads, pushed within the last year and not archived, never drops below 0.5 here. Heavy use plus silence is stability, not decay. |
| Adoption | 25% | With weekly downloads known: 50% stars (max 100k), 20% forks (max 20k), 30% downloads (max 1M). Otherwise 70% stars, 30% forks. All log scale. |
| License | 10% | Permissive 1.0, weak copyleft 0.75, strong copyleft 0.5, unrecognised 0.5, none 0. |
Tiers: **Strong** 75 and above, **Solid** 50, **Watch** 25, **Avoid**
below 25. Repos younger than 30 days get **New** instead, with the flag
too-new and a verdict that starts "Too new to judge": a launch burst of
stars and a push today say nothing yet about upkeep. Their 0-100 score is
still computed, so rankings do not change. The names are chosen to read correctly for a six-week-old project
and a six-year-old library alike. Archived repos are capped at 20 and get the