🏆 GitHub Has Secret Trophies. Here's How to See How Close You Are to the Next One

Neegueba10 — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 21:31:54 +0000

Did you know your GitHub profile has trophies? 🏆

Just like a video game, GitHub quietly hands out badges when you do certain things: merging pull requests, helping people, getting stars on your projects. Many of them even level up, from plain to 🥉 bronze, 🥈 silver and finally 🥇 gold.

But there's a catch...

GitHub shows the trophies you already have, but never tells you how close you are to the next level.

It's like playing a game with no XP bar. 😩 So I built one!

🎮 First, what are GitHub achievements?

Open any GitHub profile and look on the left side, under the profile picture. Those little round badges are achievements.

Here are the most popular ones, explained simply:

Badge	What it means	🔹 Base	🥉 Bronze	🥈 Silver	🥇 Gold
🦈 Pull Shark	Your pull requests (code changes) got merged	2	16	128	1024
🧠 Galaxy Brain	Your answer in a Discussion was marked as "the answer"	2	8	16	32
⭐ Starstruck	People starred one of your projects	16	128	512	4096
👯 Pair Extraordinaire	You coded together with someone (co-authored commits)	1	10	24	48
🤠 Quickdraw	You closed an issue or pull request within 5 minutes	1	–	–	–
🎲 YOLO	You merged a pull request without a review	1	–	–	–
💖 Public Sponsor	You sponsored someone on GitHub Sponsors	1	–	–	–

The numbers are how many you need for each level. For example, 128 merged pull requests = 🥈 silver Pull Shark.

😩 The problem

Say you have the 🥉 bronze Pull Shark. Great! But...

How many merged PRs do you have right now? 🤷
How many more until silver? 🤷
Did you already reach it, with GitHub just being slow to show it? 🤷

GitHub doesn't tell you. So I made a tool that does.

✨ Meet `gh-achievements`

One command, and you get your full progress report:

  GitHub achievements for @you

  Pull Shark            x2 bronze  ######---------- 47/128 merged PRs
  Galaxy Brain          base       ####------------ 3/8 accepted answers
  Starstruck            -          ##-------------- 2/16 stars (you/your-repo)
  Public Sponsor        -          ---------------- 0/1 sponsorships
  Quickdraw             base       done
  YOLO                  base       done

What you get:

🏅 Your current level for every badge
📊 A progress bar to the next level, using live numbers from GitHub
⏳ "Pending" alerts: GitHub can take 1–3 days to show a new badge, and the tool tells you when you've already earned one that hasn't appeared yet
👀 Anyone's progress: check your friends, your team, or your favorite developer

🚀 How to install it (2 minutes)

Step 1: Install the GitHub CLI, GitHub's official command-line tool. 👉 cli.github.com

Step 2: Log in, once:

gh auth login

Step 3: Install the extension:

gh extension install Neegueba10/gh-achievements

Step 4: Run it! 🎉

gh achievements

That's it!

🎯 More things you can do

gh achievements octocat     # see anyone's progress (try your friends!)
gh achievements --json      # get the data for your own scripts
gh achievements --no-color  # plain text, no colors

🔧 How does it work? (for the curious)

GitHub has no official API for achievements, so the tool combines two sources:

🌐 Your public achievements page tells it which badges and levels you already have.
📡 The GitHub API gives it your live numbers: merged PRs, accepted answers, stars and sponsorships.

Compare the two, and you get your progress! 🧮

It's a single small script. It works on Mac, Linux and Windows (with Git Bash), and it's free and open source under the MIT license.

💡 Quick tips to earn badges the real way

🦈 Pull Shark: contribute to open source! Look for issues labeled good first issue.
🧠 Galaxy Brain: answer questions in the Discussions tab of projects you use.
⭐ Starstruck: build something useful and share it with the world.
👯 Pair Extraordinaire: code with a friend and add them as a co-author on your commits.

🙌 Try it and tell me what you think!

👉 github.com/Neegueba10/gh-achievements

💬 Ideas or bugs? Open an issue, I'd love to hear them.
🛠️ Want to help? Pull requests are very welcome.
⭐ Found it useful? A star on the repo helps other people find it, and maybe helps me level up my own Starstruck badge. 😄

What's your favorite GitHub achievement? Tell me in the comments! 👇

DEV Community: Neegueba10