If you've spent the last few months trying to earn the Open Sourcerer or Heart On Your Sleeve badges on your GitHub profile and nothing happened no matter what you did — it's not you. It's GitHub.
Here's what actually happened, and a full rundown of which of the 11 GitHub achievement badges you can genuinely earn right now, with the real tier numbers.
The backend bug nobody talked about
Earlier in 2026, GitHub accidentally re-enabled two achievements that had been sitting in "experimental, not yet released" limbo for years: Heart On Your Sleeve (react with ❤️ to something) and Open Sourcerer (get PRs merged across multiple public repos). People started seeing them pop up on their profiles.
Then, days later, they vanished again. GitHub confirmed on the Community Discussions that it was a backend error — the two achievements were part of an unreleased experimental rollout and were never meant to go live. Once the mistake was caught, they pulled both badges back and offered no timeline for an official launch.
So if you're chasing either of these two right now: stop. There's no legitimate way to earn them — no combination of stars, reactions, or PRs will trigger a badge that GitHub has switched off at the source. The good news is that GitHub tends to calculate new badges retroactively from your existing activity when they do launch (that's exactly how Pull Shark and Starstruck worked when they first shipped) — so contributing to multiple public repos now is not wasted effort even if nothing shows up today.
The 11 badges, and which ones are actually live
| Badge | Status | How it's earned |
|---|---|---|
| Pull Shark | 🟢 Live | Merge PRs (2 / 16 / 128 / 1024 for Default → Gold) |
| Starstruck | 🟢 Live | Get stars on a public repo (16 / 128 / 512 / 4096) |
| Pair Extraordinaire | 🟢 Live | Co-author a merged PR (1 / 10 / 24 / 48) |
| Galaxy Brain | 🟢 Live | Get a Discussion answer accepted (2 / 8 / 16 / 32) |
| YOLO | 🟢 Live | Merge your own PR with no review |
| Quickdraw | 🟢 Live | Close an issue/PR within 5 minutes of opening |
| Public Sponsor | 🟢 Live | Sponsor someone publicly via GitHub Sponsors |
| Heart On Your Sleeve | 🟠 Disabled | No criteria published, not currently obtainable |
| Open Sourcerer | 🟠 Disabled | No criteria published, not currently obtainable |
| Arctic Code Vault Contributor | 🔴 Retired | Had commits in a qualifying public repo before Feb 2, 2020 |
| Mars 2020 Helicopter Contributor | 🔴 Retired | Contributed to a repo used in the Ingenuity mission before July 2020 |
One correction worth flagging if you've seen this listed elsewhere: Galaxy Brain's default tier is 2 accepted answers, not 1 — a lot of the guides floating around have this wrong.
The two badges you can earn in the next five minutes
Two of the live badges cost nothing but a few minutes on a repo you already own:
Quickdraw — open an issue, close it within 5 minutes. That's the entire requirement.
bash
gh issue create --repo <you>/<repo> --title "test" --body "quickdraw test"
gh issue close <number> --repo <you>/<repo>
YOLO — open a branch on your own repo, make a tiny change, open a PR, merge it yourself without waiting for a review. Only do this on repos you own — never on a shared or professional project.
The one that actually takes effort: Pull Shark
This is the one people get wrong the most. Pull Shark only counts merged PRs on public repositories. If most of your real work lives in private repos (which is normal — most professional and personal projects start private), none of it counts toward this badge no matter how many PRs you've merged. The fix isn't more work, it's where the work happens: contribute to open-source projects with good first issue labels, or make one of your side projects public.
Starstruck is the interesting one
This badge rewards something you can't fully control — other people finding your work valuable enough to star. The realistic path is the boring one: build something genuinely useful, write a README that actually explains what it does and why, and share it where the right people will see it. Self-stars don't count, so there's no shortcut here — just visibility plus something worth starring.
If you want the full reference
I put together a complete guide covering every badge's exact tier thresholds, current status, and how to earn each one, kept updated as GitHub changes things (like the disabled-badge situation above): https://github.com/SahilAkoliya-Dev/github-achievement-badges
If it saves you time, a star helps other people find it too — which, fittingly, is also how you'd earn Starstruck. ⭐
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