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A mutual-aid task board for developers who use subscription AI coding tools.
Some weeks you burn through your Claude Max weekly limit by Wednesday and your project stalls. Other weeks the cycle rolls over with most of it unused. Across a community those two situations happen at the same time, to different people. Spare Cycles is an attempt to connect them.
This is not a way to share, lend, pool, or resell AI subscription quota. That is against Anthropic's terms and gets accounts banned. From the Consumer Terms:
You may not share your Account login information, Anthropic API key, or Account credentials with anyone else. You also may not make your Account available to anyone else.
In February 2026 Anthropic went further and prohibited using Pro/Max OAuth tokens anywhere outside Claude Code and claude.ai, including routing other people's requests through your seat — even at low volume, even for an internal team tool.
So there are no quota pools here, no token relays, no proxies, no shared accounts. If you came looking for that, this is the wrong project. See COMPLIANCE.md.
People with spare capacity do the work themselves and hand over the result — a pull request — rather than access to their account. You sit at your own keyboard, on your own subscription, and review what you ship. That is ordinary freelance work, and it is fine.
The scarce resource was never tokens. It was people with time and willingness.
A verifiable public track record. Every delivery is a merged PR in someone's real repository, recorded in profiles/<your-handle>.md with the task type, privacy tier, and the requester's assessment. Real production code, not toy problems. That is worth something when you are job hunting or pitching contract work, in a way that a LeetCode streak is not.
Task Points (TP) are the second thing, and they are deliberately boring. TP are an internal quota mechanism, not a reward — they exist so that nobody can post tasks forever without ever doing any. You earn them by delivering, you spend them by requesting. They cannot be transferred, gifted, cashed out, or traded. There is no secondary market and there will not be one.
Most people use AI coding tools on private business code. You cannot paste that onto a public task board. This is the hard part of the problem and most of the engineering here goes into it.
Every task declares a privacy tier:
| Tier | What the worker sees | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| P0 · Public | An ordinary open-source repo | The code is already public |
| P1 · Redacted pack | Interfaces, acceptance tests, fake fixtures. No business logic. | Default for private projects |
| P2 · Ephemeral sandbox | A Codespace on the requester's repo, revoked when done. Code never touches the worker's disk. | The task genuinely needs the real codebase |
| P3 · Trust circle | Full access under NDA | Established relationships only |
P1 is the interesting one. The sparepack CLI extracts a minimal reproducible subset from your private repo — allowlist only, nothing is exposed unless you name it — strips function bodies down to signatures, swaps real data for generated fixtures, scans for credentials and PII, and makes you review the output file by file before it writes anything. The worker implements against the tests. Your business logic never leaves your machine.
Details in PRIVACY-TIERS.md.
There is no website and no server. The whole thing runs on GitHub.
- Post — open an issue with the task template. Your TP go into escrow.
- Claim — a worker comments
/claim. Limits apply: 2 concurrent, 5 per week. Real humans doing real work do not exceed that; bots hit the wall immediately. - Deliver — the worker opens a PR against your repo, closing the issue. The PR template requires them to confirm they reviewed the change themselves and shared no credentials.
- Settle — you merge, the ledger records the transfer, both profiles update.
This repository never hosts your code. Task metadata, the ledger, and reputation live here. The code itself moves directly between the two parties' own repositories.
You can still earn TP with work that does not burn any:
| Task | TP |
|---|---|
| Review someone else's delivery | 5 |
Audit a sparepack output before it goes public |
10 |
| Write acceptance tests for someone's task spec | 15 |
| Arbitrate a dispute (requires 5+ deliveries) | 10 |
Most people here develop with an AI agent, and the board is built for that. The division of labour is precise: the agent may watch, draft, and do the work; the decision to claim and the review before delivery are yours. An unattended agent that auto-claims is red line 4 — claims voided, 30-day suspension — and the first thing this board attracted was exactly that, so the rule is enforced from experience, not caution.
Watching requires nothing from us — the issues are the API:
gh api 'repos/mxx1111/spare-cycles/issues?labels=bounty&state=open' \
--jq '.[] | {title, url: .html_url, labels: [.labels[].name]}'If you run OpenClaw or a similar scheduler-equipped agent, paste it this and you are done:
Every 2 hours, check https://github.com/mxx1111/spare-cycles/issues?q=is%3Aopen+label%3Abounty for tasks I have not seen yet. If one matches my skills (TypeScript/Node), message me the title, tier, and link. Never comment, never
/claim— claiming is my decision, not yours.
That last sentence is load-bearing. What you get is "tasks find me, I only decide" — which is all the automation that survives contact with a board where the scarce thing is tasks, not workers.
Phase 0. Running tasks by hand to find out whether anyone actually shows up before building automation for it. Come break it.
MIT