User Guide

    How to read Vista

    The terminal is not a search engine over GitHub. It is a curated board of projects, people, and research, each carrying a score and a set of signals. Almost everything worth knowing is in what those signals mean — so this guide spends most of its length there, and only a little on where the buttons are.

    First run

    Your first ten minutes

    1. 1

      Open Discover and read one list.

      Discover is where the terminal opens, and it needs nothing from you — no filters, no watchlist, no setup. Pick the ranking that matches how you think: conviction rising, money already in, stars accelerating, or people open to work.

    2. 2

      Follow one row into its panel.

      Clicking a row opens the full profile — the score breakdown, the contributors, the funding history, the network. This is the point where the number stops being a number and becomes something you can argue with.

    3. 3

      Star anything worth a second look.

      The star is the only thing you have to do by hand, and it is what turns the product from a browser into a monitor. On your next visit, the Watchlist opens with what changed since you left.

    Navigation

    The six panels

    Discover

    Today's rankings

    Ranked lists rebuilt against the latest data: biggest score increases, recently funded, fastest star growth, newly added, builders open to work, and the strongest research of the week. GitHub Trending sits alongside them as a free reference point.

    Go here when: You have ten minutes and no specific question.

    Projects

    Deal Flow Pipeline

    Opens on four shelves — Ex-Tier 1 Teams, Enterprise Pull, Already Funded, Hyper Growth — each a different reason a repo might matter. "View list" turns any shelf into the full, filterable, sortable list.

    Go here when: You are working the pipeline rather than browsing it.

    Talents

    Talent Intelligence

    Five shelves read as a ladder: Under the Radar, Founders & Founding Engineers, Big Tech Alumni, Academia Talents, and Active and Open to Work — undiscovered, already founding, just left, deep research, reachable today.

    Go here when: You want people, not repositories.

    Papers

    Paper Radar

    A ranked list of recent research. One lens is ours alone: papers whose authors are also builders we already follow on GitHub — the point where research and shipped code overlap.

    Go here when: You want to see a technology before it has a repository.

    Watchlist

    Your own space

    Everything you star lands here. "What's New" compares the current numbers against your last visit and tells you what moved. Add notes, pin rows, sort things into your own groups. Anything you submit is grouped separately, and stays private to you.

    Go here when: You want the terminal to report to you instead of the other way round.

    Settings

    Account

    Plan and billing, privacy, and workspace configuration.

    Go here when: You are changing your plan or checking what your account can reach.

    Reference

    What the signals mean

    What each badge tells you. You do not have to memorise any of it — in the terminal, hovering or tapping a badge explains it in place, where you are looking at it.

    Reach Out
    Worth making contact now.
    Watch
    Worth tracking, not yet worth a conversation.
    Skip
    Not an early-stage entry point.
    Not Ranked
    Every score we show is backed by measurement. This one has none yet.
    B2B Signal
    Companies are evaluating this for real use.
    Hyper Growth
    Adoption is accelerating right now.
    Top Talent
    The people building this are unusually strong.
    Corporate OSS
    Owned by a major technology company.
    Company vs pedigree
    On a talent profile, company is where someone works now and pedigree is where they have worked before. Keeping the two apart is what makes the difference between someone impressive and someone reachable.
    ISS — the paper score
    A 0–100 investment-signal score for a piece of research: how likely the work is to matter commercially, not how well it will be received academically.
    Why some papers show a word instead of a number
    A very new paper has not yet accumulated everything the score reads from, so printing a bare number would understate it. Those papers show a tier — Strong, Notable, Emerging, Early — and are marked provisional until the full score is meaningful.
    How to

    Three things worth doing

    Find a project worth a meeting

    1. 01

      Projects → the Already Funded or Enterprise Pull shelf, then "View list".

    2. 02

      Sort by score and read the Action column first — Skip rows are already filtered out of your attention.

    3. 03

      Open one and check the contributors and the funding history before the score. The score is a ranking device; the team is the decision.

    Find an engineer you could actually reach

    1. 01

      Talents → Active and Open to Work, or Big Tech Alumni if you want people who have just left a major.

    2. 02

      Under the Radar is the contrarian shelf — strong builders the market has not noticed yet.

    3. 03

      Open the profile and read the network section — shared projects and shared employers are warmer paths than a cold message.

    Make the terminal report to you

    1. 01

      Star ten things you genuinely care about — fewer is better than more.

    2. 02

      Come back in a week and read only "What's New" in the Watchlist. It diffs the current numbers against your last visit.

    3. 03

      Add a one-line note to each row while the reason is fresh. In a month it is the only thing that still explains why you starred it.

    Access

    What Free reaches, and what Pro adds

    The free tier is a real working slice, not a demo. Its limits apply after your filter and sort — so changing the sort changes which rows you see, and the list moves as the data does.

    Free

    • Browse up to 10 rows in each filtered view — projects, talent, and papers
    • Every score is backed by evidence we measured ourselves
    • A dimension breakdown and a recommendation on every row you can see
    • Signal tags wherever a signal actually fired
    • Watchlist syncing across your devices

    Pro

    • Everything in Free, plus:
    • Unlimited browsing — no row cap on projects, talent, or papers
    • The same breakdowns, recommendations, and signal tags across the whole board, not a capped sample
    • Professional network graph — shared projects, companies, and pedigree
    • Submit your own projects and people to the enrichment pipeline
    • Keep your submissions private to your own workspace
    • Full CSV export across projects, talent, and papers

    Vista is invite-only while we are in beta. Pro is granted with the invitation, not sold.

    Questions

    Questions we get

    How fresh is any of this?
    The boards are rebuilt on a schedule through the day, so a score can move between two visits. Every paper carries its publication date, and every project its last activity.
    I know a repository that isn't here.
    The board is curated, not exhaustive — it is a filtered view of open source, which is the point. Pro accounts can submit a project or a person to the enrichment pipeline; a submission stays private to your workspace until the crawler independently finds it, at which point it becomes part of the public board.
    Why did my list stop early?
    Free accounts see a fixed number of rows per view. The cut happens after your filter and sort, so a different sort shows you a different set — you are never locked to one frozen page.
    Where do the scores come from?
    The scoring model is described on the mechanism page, and the reasoning behind the whole approach on about.