open-source-octopus-investigation

Open-Source Octopus Investigation — a Claude Code skill

A Claude Code skill for graph-based discovery of open-source projects and contributors. Instead of keyword search, you start from a single origin (a person or topic) and extend tentacles outward through their GitHub social graph — stars, follows, contributions — following human curation rather than search queries.

This surfaces projects that are hard to find through traditional search, because you're leveraging the taste and judgment of people already working in the space.

Why it works

• Graph-based, not keyword-based — follow what practitioners star and who they follow.
• Stars are signal — what someone stars reveals their interests more honestly than their bio.
• Tentacles are thematic — discoveries are organized by what they do, not who led you to them, which makes the output actionable.
• It compounds — each run generates unexplored leads that seed the next search.

Requirements

• The gh CLI, authenticated (gh auth status). All crawling uses gh api — no scraping.

Install

Works with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Clone the repo once, then install for your tool(s):

git clone https://github.com/thdelmas/open-source-octopus-investigation.git
cd open-source-octopus-investigation

Claude Code

Claude skills are a folder containing SKILL.md. Copy it into your skills directory:

# Global (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation
cp SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation/

# Or per-project: .claude/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation/SKILL.md

Invoke with /open-source-octopus-investigation, or just say "octopus investigation starting from obra".

Codex

Codex skills use the same SKILL.md format as Claude — only the directory differs:

# User scope (all repos)
mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation
cp SKILL.md ~/.agents/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation/

# Or per-repo: .agents/skills/open-source-octopus-investigation/SKILL.md

Codex invokes it explicitly or implicitly based on the description's triggers.

Cursor

Cursor uses plain-markdown commands. Copy the command file:

# Global (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.cursor/commands
cp cursor/open-source-octopus-investigation.md ~/.cursor/commands/

# Or per-project: .cursor/commands/open-source-octopus-investigation.md

Type / in Cursor's chat and pick open-source-octopus-investigation.

What it does

However you invoke it, the skill scopes the search with you first (origin, depth, call budget, whether to file issues), crawls the social graph, clusters findings into named tentacles, logs everything to a dedup tracker, and reports back with the most promising leads for the next run.

The method

See SKILL.md for the full process. In short:

1. Pick an origin — one well-chosen profile beats five mediocre ones.
2. Crawl the social graph — repos, stars, following, followers.
3. Extend tentacles — cluster discoveries by theme, breadth-first.
4. Log everything — a dedup tracker so you never re-crawl the same network.
5. Report / file issues — what each find is, why it matters, how to integrate.
6. Track unexplored leads — they seed future searches.

License

MIT