Unread GitHub notification is killing me
The badge was always there but there was no notifications inside. Here's how to fix it.
I've discovered coding back in 2013 and three years later I spent all my summer building my first Laravel app which is still in production by the non-profit I've built for.
Now I'm struggling to find the balance between enjoying the power of "I can build this myself" and not chocking myself to death trying to build everything myself.
As it is common for developers to be less articulate, I decided to leverage writing about my endeavours, to keep me up.
For a couple of weeks, if not months at this point, I’ve been feeling terrorized as I am someone who only subscribes to notifications that are of an interest to me. That is so, when I find myself on the GitHub website, I would intentionally click on them and be informed of any issues that matter to me.
However since late summer I’ve been seeing a badge of new notification but there was no way to clear it. I was hoping it’d go away by itself one day. I even tried the GitHub app on the phone. Nothing.
My OCD is unfortunately too big and it got to the point where I was ready to open a ticket and complain about it. But I must say they did a good job suggesting issues that might be related.
I click on the first one and quickly discover a pleasant idea - to use the API to mark all notifications as read.
Ref: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874#discussioncomment-2859125
Let’s try. I open my terminal in Warp, setup a GitHub token using 1password (I already use that) and make the cURL call.
TOKEN=$(op read op://Personal/GithubAccountItem/token)
curl -X PUT \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" \
-H "Authorization: token $TOKEN" \
https://api.github.com/notifications \
-d '{"last_read_at":"2025-10-10T00:00:00Z"}'
Yayy, I feel relieved! I am no longer distracted and that matters a ton to me.
