commit-fm

Commit FM

Your GitHub profile is a museum. This is a radio station.

An animated SVG banner for your profile README that shows the repositories you are actually working on right now, and the others in rotation, in seven retro skins. Runs on GitHub Actions. No server, no API key, no model calls.

Why

Stars, streaks and a language pie chart are all past tense. None of them tell a visitor what you are building this week, which is the only thing they actually came to find out.

That is the same information problem a music player solves: one thing is playing, a queue sits behind it, and one small display has to say so at a glance. So Commit FM borrows the display. Repository name, one line about it, how warm the last push is, and the rest of the rotation scrolling past.

It is built for busy profiles. If you have twenty repositories and four of them are alive this month, a visitor currently has no way to tell which four.

Skins

Pick one with "style" in your config. Every skin renders from the same data.

terminal

cmus with a cava spectrum. Native to the audience reading a developer's profile. The bars are real pushes per hour over the last 24, with a fast attack and a slow decay.

splitflap

An airport departures board. The only skin that gets better the more repositories you have, because more rows is what the object is for.

dotmatrix

An amber LED destination sign. The one that can honestly represent private work: it prints a count with no repository name attached.

winamp

The classic skin, compressed into one strip. Loud, nostalgic, unmistakable.

carradio

A tuner fascia where every repository is a station on the dial and the needle seeks between them. The seven segment digits are drawn as paths, so nothing is embedded.

vumeter

Analogue meter and a studio lamp. The needle steps to each reading and settles, because an instrument that holds a value looks like it is measuring something.

vinyl

The quiet one. Light ground, editorial type, one turning record and nothing else in motion. For a profile that does not want to shout.

Install

Two files and about a minute.

1. Add commitfm.json to your profile repository (the one named after your username).

{
  "user": "YOUR-USERNAME",
  "style": "terminal",
  "theme": "auto"
}

2. Add the workflow at .github/workflows/commit-fm.yml. Copy it from .github/workflows/commit-fm.yml in this repository. It asks for one permission, contents: write, and nothing else.

3. Put the banner in your README.

![Commit FM](commit-fm.svg)

Run the workflow once by hand from the Actions tab and the banner appears. After that it refreshes on its own and commits only when something actually changed.

No token to create. No account anywhere. Nothing to configure beyond those three steps.

A note on the numbers. GitHub's public events endpoint reports that a push happened, not how many commits were in it: the documented payload carries only before, head, push_id, ref and repository_id, and the optional counters come back empty on real accounts. So Commit FM counts pushes, and says pushes. It would be easy to print a commit count nobody can verify, and it would be wrong.

Configuration

{
  "user": "OthmanAdi",
  "style": "terminal",
  "theme": "auto",
  "exclude": ["a-repo-nobody-needs-to-see"],
  "pin": ["the-one-i-want-first"]
}

Key	Meaning
user	Whose activity to read
style	One of the seven skin ids above
theme	light, dark, or auto
exclude	Repository names to keep off the banner entirely. Applied last, after every other rule
	Your profile repository, the one named after your account, is excluded automatically. It is the frame around the banner rather than a project, and this tool commits into it, so it would otherwise make itself the thing permanently playing. Pin it to override that
pin	Repository names to put at the front of the rotation

Let an agent take the microphone

Commits tell a visitor what finished. They cannot tell anyone what is happening right now, and increasingly the thing happening right now is an agent working on your behalf.

So the banner has a second lane. An agent writes one line into commitfm.json:

commit-fm say "refactoring the hook dispatcher" --repo margin --ttl 90

{
  "broadcast": {
    "repo": "margin",
    "note": "refactoring the hook dispatcher",
    "by": "claude-opus-5",
    "at": "2026-09-06T06:10:00Z",
    "ttlMinutes": 90
  }
}

The banner shows that instead of the derived description, and marks itself live. When the note passes its time to live it is ignored and the banner falls back to push history on its own, so a forgotten line cannot still claim you are hard at work three weeks later.

say and clear only edit the file. They never touch the network and never run git, so the tool cannot push anything on your behalf.

What installing this does not do

Something agent controlled that renders on your public profile is exactly the shape you should be suspicious of. So here is the answer before you have to ask for it.

One sentence has to stay true, and everything in the design exists to keep it true: installing Commit FM grants nobody access they did not already have, adds no secret, opens no inbound endpoint, and spends no model tokens.

• No token to create. The workflow uses the credential GitHub mints for each run and expires when the run ends. It requests contents: write and nothing else, in four lines you can read before you install it.
• No server. The banner is a static file committed to your own repository. There is no endpoint holding your data, so there is nothing to breach and nobody to trust.
• The agent lane adds no permission. An agent writes a file in a repository it can already write to. One that could not do that before still cannot. Uninstalling is deleting the file, and git log is a complete, attributable record of every claim any agent made.
• Zero model calls. Nothing here asks a model to summarise, rewrite or invent anything.
• Private repositories need three independent failures to leak a name. The default endpoint cannot return them at all. Private work appears only as GitHub's own server side aggregate count with no name attached, and only if you already enabled that on your own profile. An explicit exclude list runs after both.
• The image has no active content by construction. No scripts, no foreign objects, no external references. A hostile repository description can print text and nothing else. Every render is checked at the boundary before it is written.
• No dependencies. Not one. The whole thing is plain Node with the standard library, and third party actions are pinned by commit SHA rather than by a tag somebody can move.

See SECURITY.md for the detail, including how untrusted text is handled.

Local use

npx commit-fm render --style terminal --user YOUR-USERNAME --out commit-fm.svg
npx commit-fm styles      # list the seven
npx commit-fm doctor      # check your config and report what is wrong

Development

git clone https://github.com/OthmanAdi/commit-fm
cd commit-fm
node --test test/          # no install step, there is nothing to install
node scripts/render-examples.mjs

Style modules are pure functions of state: no network, no clock, no randomness. That is a hard rule, because a workflow commits the output and a nondeterministic renderer would produce a commit on every scheduled run forever.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.