What percentage of GitHub activity goes to GitHub repos with less than 2 stars? I would guess it's close to the same number.
Personally I think comparing github stars is always going to be a fraught metric.
Its business is underpinned by pre-AI assumptions about usage that, based on its recent instability, I suspect is being invalidated by surges in AI-produced code and commits.
I'm worried, at some point, they'll be forced to take an unpopular stance and either restrict free usage tiers or restrict AI somehow. I'm unsure how they'll evolve.
Github is still code-centric with issues and discussions being auxilliary/supporting features around the code. At some point those will become the frontline features, and the code will become secondary.
Also I would guess there would be copy-on-write and other such optimizations at Github. It's unlikely that when you fork a repo, somewhere on a disk the entire .git is being copied (but even if it was, it's not that expensive).
But also, GitHub profiles and repos were at one point a window into specific developers - like a social site for coders. Now it's suffering from the same problem that social media sites suffer from - AI-slop and unreliable signals about developers. Maybe that doesn't matter so much if writing code isn't as valuable anymore.
If you need to host git + a nice gui (as opposed to needing to promote your shit) Forgejo is free software.
In hindsight the headline was a bit more sensational than I meant it to be!
Agentic coding is not about creating software, it's about solving the problems we used to need software to solve directly.
The only reason I put my agentic code in a repo is so that I can version control changes. I don't have any intention of sharing that code with other people because it wouldn't be useful for them. If people want to solve a similar problem to me, they're much better of making their own solution.
I'm not at all surprised that most of Claude linked output is in low star repos. The only Claude repos I even bother sharing are those that are basically used as context-stores to help other people get up to speed faster with there of CC work.
They are bookmarks. It is a way to bookmark a repo, and while it might correlate with quality, it isn't a measure of it.
Whatever reaction you have to this know that my internal reaction and yours were probably close.
At 2mo old - nearly a 1GB repo, 24M loc, 52K commits
https://github.com/thomaspryor/Broadwayscore
Polished site:https://broadwayscorecard.com/
Someone might want to tell the author to ask Claude what a database is typically used for...
That's the kind of "highlight" from a review when you use AI to extract/summarize content instead of asking a real human editor to do the job.
One used Lenovo micro PC (size of a book) from eBay will serve you well.
The framing assumes github repos are supposed to be products.
I used Claude code to build a custom notes application for my specific requirements.
It’s not perfect, but I barely invested 10 hours in it and it does almost everything I could have asked for, plus some really cool stuff that mostly just works after one iteration. I’ll probably open source the code at some point, and I fully expect the project to have less than two stars.
Still, I have my application.
For anyone that’s interested in taking a look, my terrible landing page is at rayvroberts.com
Auto updates don’t work quite right just yet. You have to manually close the app after the update downloads, because it is still sandboxed from when I planned to distribute via the Mac App Store. Rejected in review because users bring their own Claude key.
The idea with Claude writing code for most part is that everyone can write software that they need. Software for the audience of one. GitHub is just a place for them to live beyond my computer.
Why will I want to promote it or get stars?
- 98% of human's repos have <2 stars
Claude is 5 times smarter than humans!
The math is a bit of a stretch, but the correlation still holds up.
The 50B lines across those low-star repos isn't just an interesting metric about usage patterns. It's a significant amount of unreviewed code sitting in public repositories. Stars were never a quality signal, but they were at least a proxy for "someone other than the author looked at this." That selection effect disappears entirely when the build cost drops to near zero.
Unfortunately that type of analysis would take a bit more work, but I think the repo info and commit messages could probably be used to do that.
It is interesting to see a flip in attitude toward GitHub.
I have never cared about LinkedIn or GitHub stars or any of those bullshit metrics (obviously because I don't score very highly in them), and am enjoying exploring a million things at the speed of thought; get left outside, if it suits you. Smart and flexible people have no trouble using it, and it's amazing.
Rather measure how much I've learnt and created recently compared to before, and get ready for some sobering shit because us experienced old dudes can judge good code from bad pretty well.
As if it's to prevent the species from over-indexing on a particular set of behaviors.
Like how divisive films such as "Signs", "Cloud Atlas", and even "The Last Jedi" are loved by some and utterly reviled by others.
While that's kind of a silly case, maybe it's not just some random statistical fluke, but actually a function of the species at a population level to keep us from over-indexing and suboptimizing in some local minima or exploring some dangerous slope, etc.
Came across this from this ShowHN post yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501348
