How I built a tool that checks if a GitHub issue already has a PR — and why that's the feature nobody built

I kept doing this. Find a beginner-friendly issue. Fork the repo. Set up the dev environment. Read through the codebase. Start working. Then check the issue again and see a comment from 2 days ago: "Hey I'm working on this, should have a PR up soon." Two hours wasted. Every single time. The weird part? Almost every existing tool for finding open source issues - goodfirstissue.dev , up-for-grabs.net , codetriage - rely on static lists or periodic scrapes. They show you issues, but they don't show