/repo-description-polish — GitHub Repo Description

Audit the GitHub repository description field and propose a polished replacement.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS

• <owner/repo> — one or more target repos. Defaults to the repo containing the current working directory.
• --dry-run (default) — propose only.
• --apply — present proposal, prompt for approval, then write via gh repo edit.

What this solves

The description is the single sentence that decides whether a stranger clicks. It shows in:

• GitHub search results
• GitHub repo cards and "related repos"
• Hacker News, Slack, Discord link previews (OpenGraph)
• Package registries when the repo is linked from a package
• LLM-driven "what tools exist for X" recall

Bad descriptions are very common in the user's repos:

PRIVATE moat             🏰 M.O.A.T: Mixture of Adaptive Tokenizers
PRIVATE bread            🥖
PRIVATE smoge            🐉🤖
PRIVATE sushi            🍣
PUBLIC  gh-weekly        <no description>
PUBLIC  papers           <no description>
PUBLIC  x-ray            <no description>

Emoji-only and empty descriptions kill discoverability for both humans and LLMs.

What a good description looks like

✅ "Workerd-based hypervisor with a declarative Cap'n Proto manifest. Substrate-level
    identity, audit, and per-bundle credential scoping. Today's primary application:
    hosting MCP servers behind one HTTP face." (cloister)

✅ "Open-source data plane primitives: arena storage, schema contracts, filesystem
    projection, tree-sitter AST, LSP integration." (ley-line-open)

Pattern:

1. Category noun first — what kind of thing is this? (hypervisor, library, protocol, CLI)
2. Defining trait — what distinguishes it from peers in that category?
3. (Optional) Primary use case — what does someone actually do with it?

Length target: 120–250 chars. GitHub truncates around 350 in some surfaces.

Hard rules

• No emoji-only descriptions. They convey nothing in search results.
• No starting emoji decoration unless the project has a strong logo association already. If unsure, drop it.
• No promotional adjectives: blazing fast, next-gen, revolutionary, cutting-edge. Search engines deprioritize, humans skip, LLMs ignore.
• No initialisms without expansion in the first sentence. "BREAD" alone is opaque; "BREAD (Bidirectional Recurrent Encoder for Anchored Diffusion)" is searchable.
• Lead with the category noun, not the project name. GitHub already shows the name; you don't need to repeat it.

Workflow

Phase 1: Inventory

gh repo view <owner/repo> --json name,description,repositoryTopics,visibility,isFork,isArchived,homepageUrl,primaryLanguage

Skip with a printed reason if isFork or isArchived. Continue on private repos only if explicitly named (private repo descriptions still affect search inside an org).

Phase 2: Signal gathering

Read in this priority order:

1. README first 1000 chars — the value prop is almost always there if it exists anywhere
2. <h1> or first heading + first paragraph — often a usable seed
3. Tagline near top of CLAUDE.md / ARCHITECTURE.md if present
4. Package manifest description fields — package.json, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml
5. The repo name itself — what does the name suggest the project is?

Phase 3: Diagnose the current description

Classify the existing description into one of:

For class working, skip the repo and report. Don't rewrite working content.

Phase 4: Proposal

Produce one proposal per repo:

## <owner/repo>

Current:  <description or "(empty)">
Class:    <empty|emoji-only|vague|marketing|acronym-only|working|working-but-stale>

Proposed: <new description>
Length:   <N> chars

Rationale:
  - <why this category noun>
  - <what trait makes it distinct>
  - <what was wrong with the old one>

Rejected alternatives:
  - "<other phrasing>" — too vague / too marketing / etc.

Phase 5: Approval

Print all proposals as one document. Then:

• --dry-run (default): stop. Print a hint to re-run with --apply.
• --apply: print "Apply these N description changes? (yes/no)" and wait. Only proceed on explicit affirmative.

Phase 6: Apply

gh repo edit "<owner>/<repo>" --description "<new text>"

Notes:

• Escape inner double quotes if any (rare — descriptions shouldn't have them).
• Verify by re-reading with gh repo view <owner/repo> --json description.

Phase 7: Report

Applied:
  agentic-research/mache           — was: "🗂️ The Universal..."
                                     now: "Graph-native code intelligence..."
  jamestexas/bread                 — was: "🥖"
                                     now: "BREAD (Bidirectional Recurrent..."
Skipped:
  agentic-research/cloister        — description already strong
  jamestexas/papers                — no README signal, needs human input

Examples

/repo-description-polish agentic-research/mache
→ dry-run proposal for mache

/repo-description-polish jamestexas/bread jamestexas/moat --apply
→ proposal for both, prompts for approval, writes via gh

/repo-description-polish
→ uses current working directory's repo

Important rules

• Default to --dry-run. Descriptions are visible to anyone, including the org page.
• One field per pass. Do not bundle description changes with topic or homepage changes — that's the parent repo-seo-curator's job to sequence.
• If a description is already strong, skip the repo. Churn hurts SEO.
• Don't touch forks or archived repos unless explicitly named.
• For private repos, ask before writing. Even private descriptions are visible to org members in some surfaces; the user may want different copy than for public.