changewatch

You can already see what you did. What you cannot see is whether anyone else did anything about it — the first citation, the first star from a stranger, the first time your name appears somewhere you did not put it.

Install it Run it as an Action

pip install changewatch · MIT · silent unless somebody else acts

What it does

pip install changewatch
changewatch init
changewatch check

Almost every run says nothing happened and exits. That is the design.

Why it only reports other people

The first ORCID this was pointed at reported six citations. All six were the author citing himself, doubled because Zenodo mints a DOI per version. Six is a number that feels like an audience; the real figure was zero.

A tool that cannot tell your own activity from a stranger's rings on your own deposits, gets muted inside a week, and is then silent on the day something real happens. So every source checks your ORCID, your names and your logins.

It does not trust the search engine

Asked for the exact phrase "openapi-drift", Hacker News returned a five-month-old thread titled “How do you catch OpenAPI drift before the UI breaks?” — two words, and not about anybody's package. Every hit is checked against the text locally, because a search engine's idea of a phrase is not yours.

The first run is silent

It has nothing to compare against, so everything looks new. A doorbell that announces months of history the moment it is plugged in gets unplugged. The first run learns; the second one rings.

PyPI Source

How it works

Tell it who you arechangewatch init writes a config. Your ORCID, your names, your logins, so your own activity is never reported as somebody noticing you.
Run it once to learnThe first run records what is already there and says nothing. A doorbell that announces months of history the moment it is plugged in gets unplugged.
Put it on a scheduleThe Action runs it weekly and opens an issue when it rings. Almost every run does nothing and says so.

What it watches, and what it refuses to do

Citations, stars, mentionsORCID and OpenAlex, GitHub, and exact-phrase mentions.

It silences youThe first ORCID this was pointed at reported six citations. All six were the author citing himself, doubled because Zenodo mints a DOI per version. Six feels like an audience; the real figure was zero.

It does not trust the search engineAsked for the exact phrase "openapi-drift", Hacker News returned a five-month-old thread about neither. Every hit is re-checked against the text locally.

A threshold, not a diffA number that wanders is not news. Small absolute moves stay quiet; nothing-to-something always rings.

The first run is silentBy design. It learns, then it rings.

It needs somewhere to ringThe Action opens an issue. A scheduled job that succeeds silently is indistinguishable from one that never ran.

Specifications

Install	pip install changewatch
License	MIT
Needs	GITHUB_TOKEN for the GitHub half
Source	vince-gonzalez/changewatch

Questions

Will it spam me?: Almost every run reports nothing and exits. That is the design and the reason it is a doorbell rather than a dashboard.
Does it count my own activity?: No, explicitly. Every source checks your ORCID, your names and your logins first.
What does it need?: A GITHUB_TOKEN for the GitHub half. Everything else is public.