90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars

https://www.claudescode.dev/?window=since_launch

by louiereederson • 4 months ago

337 219 4 months ago

Toggling the stars shows 50b lines of code created across all projects, only 5b on projects with 2+ stars since Claude Code launch. Kind of eye opening where these Claude Code tokens are going.

Came across this from this ShowHN post yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501348

phantomCupcake5• 4 months ago

Thanks for starting the conversation and sharing my dashboard. :)

louiereederson7• 4 months ago

I hope you don't mind, I thought this was a really valuable dashboard.

tombert• 4 months ago

I mean, most of the code that I have written to Github with normal human intelligence also goes to Github repos will less than two stars. They're usually repos that I create and no one else touches.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

I'd betcha a lot more than 90% goes to repositories without any stars at all, or even public code!

phantomCupcake5• 4 months ago

Absolutely! I think the real stats will far exceed what we can see on public GitHub. That said, going through some of the top "performers" by commit and line count - I am surprised by how many people have all their code in public repos.

xnyan• 4 months ago

I have many GH repos, most have no stars. Probably because most of what I write is not very useful to other people due to quality or use case. I would say this is true of most fully human-created repos on GitHub.

furyofantares• 4 months ago

100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.

Maxion• 4 months ago

Someone in our org starred our main repo, so for me this isn't true.

wombat-man• 4 months ago

Yeah, all my serious stuff is proprietary. Github, for me at least, is for trying out ideas and fun. Which is why every project is unfinished. :-)

user3939382• 4 months ago

At a glance this may read as “most of this code isn’t valuable to others” but reality is probably complected with “this type of code is reducing the need for shared libraries”.

Vektorceraptor2• 4 months ago

guilty :) 1 Star here - and even that is worthless

Aurornis• 4 months ago

Perfect example of a base rate fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

What percentage of GitHub activity goes to GitHub repos with less than 2 stars? I would guess it's close to the same number.

levocardia• 4 months ago

My reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!

nickcw• 4 months ago

The first thing I do when I make a new repo is star it myself ;-)

sleepybrett• 4 months ago

I have a few dozen org repos, of course none of them have stars, who stars their corporate repos?

red_admiral2• 4 months ago

My private repos also have 0 stars!

(But I don't use AI on them.)

SegfaultSeagull• 4 months ago

Starring GitHub repos considered harmful.

tlogan2• 4 months ago

The actual number is that 98% have less than 2 stars (0 or 1). About 90.25% has zero stars.

wetoastfood• 4 months ago

How do you know that?

ZeWaka• 4 months ago

I think this is useful in answering the grandparent comment's question:

stars : uniq(k)

1 : 14946505

10 : 1196622

100 : 213026

1000 : 28944

10000 : 1847

100000 : 20

jwpapi• 4 months ago

You should check recent commits, because obviously there are a lot of forked 0 star repos.

GorbachevyChase• 4 months ago

Sounds like Claude commits are, on average, going into higher visibility repositories than humans… maybe the author would like to reconsider their approach?

driftnode• 4 months ago

So Claude repos are statistically more likely to have stars than the average GitHub repo. Not the conclusion the headline was going for.

louiereederson7• 4 months ago

Funny how everyone gravitated towards analysis of the star distribution of REPOS when the headline claim is on ADDITIONS. If you look at my comment below (invite you to verify the stats), the distribution of additions by star count is far more weighted to 2+ star repos in GitHub overall. The observation is meaningful, up to the observer to draw a conclusion. Is Claude just speeding up output or is it generating piles of spaghetti code with no use? Considering the get rich quick economy that has sprung up around app development, I'm inclined to at least consider the latter.

ttul• 4 months ago

Yeah. Most of my public repos have 0 stars. Most of what I write sucks.

Joel_Mckay9• 4 months ago

Yeah, but knowing something sucks means you are probably reasonably competent at coding. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

ryandrake• 4 months ago

GitHub Stars (or any online 'star count') is not an indicator of quality.

_lvbh• 4 months ago

Stars occasionally correlate with quality but more often it's timing and naming. I have a total of 40k stars on GitHub, and I know the code is shit in most of those repos (many written back when I was 16-18 as I was just learning to code). Jumping on hype trains before they start is how you get stars.

runarberg• 4 months ago

There is still a sampling bias if you compare blanket human written repos. I would guess people are far more likely to share their homework assignments, experiments, hackathon results, weekend toys, etc. as a public repo if they put some amount of work into it. I would guess minority of those would get any stars at all. If the whole thing was generated by AI in less then 20 minutes, I would guess they are more likely to simply throw it away when they are done with it.

Personally I think comparing github stars is always going to be a fraught metric.

zahrevsky• 4 months ago

Off topic, but it reminds me of another principle: every geographic heatmap is just a population map. https://xkcd.com/1138/

jamesfinlayson3• 4 months ago

Yep, every time I see a heatmap of Australian lotto winners - very high correlation with Australia's population.

bonoboTP• 4 months ago

That, or https://i.redd.it/soy72dye93o91.jpg

corysama• 4 months ago

https://reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/

leptons• 4 months ago

Activity isn't a good measurement for this, because AI can vibeslop thousands of lines per day of code that isn't necessarily useful for anything but increasing activity.

iheartbiggpus• 4 months ago

Exactly, just pick one subset and make out as if a base rate is because of this one specific set. Backwards logic...

faangguyindia3• 4 months ago

When I first got a job, I asked the company okay, how many people are going to use the code i write?

If the answer wasn't in hundreds of request per seconds, i wasn't interested in job.

I found job at ad tech companies, pay wasn't any good but the challenges were immense.

Most people write code, which will hardly be run by other people or even receive any customers.

ebiester• 4 months ago

One of the products my employer builds is used twice a year. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of using it twice a year. It's tremendously valuable to be used twice a year.

Value and use are not always synonymous.

louiereederson7• 4 months ago

OP. I'm not a confident SQL user so encourage someone to double check this. From what I can tell have been 2.21x10^12 additions on GitHub in total, 6.36x10^11 of which are in repos with 2+ stars. That's about 29%. People earlier were comparing the star distribution of repos which is not really what this is about - it is about OUTPUT, as measured by additions.

Interestingly, there are 21.37b commits in GitHub, implying 104 additions per commit. Per the dashboard, Claude is linked to 20.81m commits and 50.44b additions - or 2,424 additions/commit. So additions for Claude-linked repos is higher, and it's actually higher for repos with 0-1 stars (2,568 additions/commit for Claude, 91 for all GitHub). None of this is a smoking gun but aligns with the intuition that Claude is producing enormous amounts of code. TBD whether it is 'adding value'.

Would be appreciative of anyone who verifies/invalidates this. https://play.clickhouse.com/ https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/#clickhouse-demo-access

Computer0• 4 months ago

I have a star on one of my repos. Almost all of my work is only relevant to me or is internal to my org.

mikkupikku• 4 months ago

Maybe because people are using claude to to write code for themselves, to scratch their own itch, and upload it to the world just because. The value of code can't be measured in star counts.

dev_l1x_be• 4 months ago

Did we democratise software engineering? Seriously, I created a bunch of tools that I find useful without the bloated framework issues that are present in software nowadays. Jokes on me if something does not work.

heliumtera• 4 months ago

Software production yes engineering no lol

Fpailo2• 4 months ago

exactly

chrisweekly• 4 months ago

Even if that stat were compared directly to the base rate (human output), it could easily be explained by correlating strongly with Claude usage skewing towards new repos.

throwaway27448• 4 months ago

Do people really put weight in stars? It seems completely unrelated to anything but, well, popularity. Even when I modify other peoples' code I fork to a private repo and maintain my changes separately, and I'm fairly certain I have never starred a repo.

thorum• 4 months ago

Stars have been useless as signals for project quality for a while. They’re mostly bought, at this point. I regularly see obviously vibe-coded nonsense projects on GitHub’s Trending page with 10,000 stars. I don’t believe 10,000 people have even cloned the repo, much less gotten any personal value from it. It’s meaningless.

kristopolous• 4 months ago

I'm with you on all points except for it being bought.

Programming has long succumbed to influencer dynamics and is subject to the same critiques as any other kind of pop creation. Popular restaurants, fashion, movies - these aren't carefully crafted boundary pushing masterpieces.

Pop books are hastily written and usually derivative. Pop music is the same as is pop art. Popular podcasts and YouTube channels are usually just people hopping unprepared on a hot mic and pushing record.

Nobody is reading a PhD thesis or a scholarly journal on the bus.

The markers for the popularity of pop works are fairly independent from the quality of their content. It's the same dynamics as the popular kid at school.

So pop programming follows this exact trend. I don't know why we expect humans to behave foundationally differently here.

brookst2• 4 months ago

Meaningless is maybe too strong.

I have 60-ish repos, vast majority are zero star, one or two with a star or two, one with 25-ish. It’s a signal to me of interest in and usage of that project.

Doesn’t mean stars are perfect, or can’t be gamed, or anything in a universally true generalization sense. But also not meaningless.

Vektorceraptor2• 4 months ago

I star repos as bookmarks. Don't know if there is another feature for that

zadikian• 4 months ago

I've seen people "buy" stars enough not to look at them so closely. Maybe will consider whether it has 0-1 or 2-2M.

robarr• 4 months ago

For example, it's used as a kind of internal bookmarking system. I don't necessarily star a repo because I think it has good code, but maybe a good idea or something related to something I'm interested in developing.

ianbutler• 4 months ago

Maybe not to devs, but I've had VCs ask about them because of popularity so there you go it's a signal to someone.

Whatever reaction you have to this know that my internal reaction and yours were probably close.

ModernMech2• 4 months ago

Probably not today, but there was a time when you could get funding based on just a github repo with a bunch of stars.

heavyset_go4• 4 months ago

It's more of a signal for investigating "did this get spammed on Reddit or Twitter", "is this new/old/weird hype", and "does this provide real value"

cortesoft2• 4 months ago

Stars on GitHub have nothing to do with quality.

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.

grimgrin• 4 months ago

it’s my signal for popular forks

annie511266728• 4 months ago

Stars have always tracked attention more than quality.

It’s just way cheaper to spin up repos now — lots of these are probably one-and-done.

phantomCupcake5• 4 months ago

Claude's Code dev here, and I thought I would chime in on this point to clarify why I track it at all.

When I started reading commit data, it became painfully apparent that a very large number of repos are tests, demos, or tutorials. If you have at least 1 star, that excludes most of those - unless you starred it yourself. Having 2 stars excludes the projects that are self-starred.

Starring is also quite common with my friends and colleagues as a way to find repos again later, so there is some use to it, but I agree it's not a perfect indicator of utility or quality.

anon7000• 4 months ago

The HN headline is at least misleading, because I suspect a majority of Claude usage is at the enterprise level (deep pockets), which goes to private GitHub repos.

ramoz• 4 months ago

Shout out to Broadwayscore by thomaspryor@github

At 2mo old - nearly a 1GB repo, 24M loc, 52K commits

https://github.com/thomaspryor/Broadwayscore

Polished site:https://broadwayscorecard.com/

mjr00• 4 months ago

I was really confused how this could be possible for such a seemingly simple site but it looks like it's storing + writing many new commits every time there's a new review, or new financial data, or a new show, etc.

Someone might want to tell the author to ask Claude what a database is typically used for...

a-dub• 4 months ago

json in git for reference data actually isn't terrible. having it with the code isn't great, and the repo is massively bloated in other ways, but for change tracking a source of truth, not bad except for maybe it should be canonicalized.

sanex• 4 months ago

It is pretty damn fast though.

kevmo3142• 4 months ago

What is git if not a database for source code?

heavyset_go4• 4 months ago

Lol @ the proprietary license, you can just copy and use whatever Claude-committed code you want to from that repository.

fluidcruft3• 4 months ago

Can you? My understanding is that AI cannot claim copyright and my assumption would be that copyright law immediately extends authorship to the user operating the AI (or their employer).

g947o2• 4 months ago

“A fully staged “Sweeney Todd” opened Sunday at Broadway’s Lunt.”

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.

madrox3• 4 months ago

Already enough comments about base rate fallacy, so instead I'll say I'm worried for the future of GitHub.

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.

hungryhobbit• 4 months ago

Or they'll just keep forcing policies that let them steal the code you post on GitHub (for their AI training), and make everyone leave that way.

phantomCupcake5• 4 months ago

This.

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.

louiereederson7• 4 months ago

The instability is related to their Azure migration isn't it? Cynically you could say it hasn't been helped by the rolling RIFs at Microsoft

madeofpalk• 4 months ago

Does anyone actually know? So far I've just seen people guessing, and seeing that repeated.

progmetaldev2• 4 months ago

I keep hearing this, and I know Azure has had some issues recently, but I rarely have an issue with Azure like I do with GitHub. I have close to 100 websites on Azure, running on .NET, mostly on Azure App Service (some on Windows 2016 VMs). These sites don't see the type of traffic or amount of features that GitHub has, but if we're talking about Azure being the issue, I'm wondering if I just don't see this because there aren't enough people dependent on these sites compared to GitHub?

Or instead, is it mistakes being made migrating to Azure, rather than Azure being the actual problem? Changing providers can be difficult, especially if you relied on any proprietary services from the old provider.

petcat• 4 months ago

In a (possibly near) future where most new code is generated by AI bots, the code itself becomes incidental/commodotized and it's nothing more than an intermediate representation (IR) of whatever solution it was prompt-engineered to produce. The value will come from the proposals, reviews, and specifications that caused that code to be produced.

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.

OccamsMirror• 4 months ago

This is exactly what people said about the "low code revolution".

Not saying that you are wrong, necessarily. But I think it's still a pretty broad presumption.

gbalduzzi• 4 months ago

I'm definitely not an AI skeptic and I use it constantly for coding, but I don't think we are approaching this future at all without a new technological revolution.

Specifications accurate enough to describe the exact behaviors are basically equivalent to code, also in terms of length, so you basically just change language (and current LLM tech is not on course to be able to handle such big specifications)

Higher level specifications (the ones that make sense) leave some details and assumption to the implementation, so you can not safely ignore the implementation itself and you cannot recreate it easily (each LLM build could change the details and the little assumptions)

So yeah, while I agree that documentation and specifications are more and more important in the AI world, I don't see the path to the conclusions you are drawing

madrox3• 4 months ago

I think you're directionally correct, but this stuff still has to live somewhere, whether the repo is code or prompts. GitHub is actually pretty well-positioned to evolve into whatever is next.

I don't think GitHub's product is at risk, but its business model might.

philipp-gayret• 4 months ago

Having managed GitHub enterprises for thousands of developers who will ping you at the first sign of instability.. I can tell you there has not been one year pre-AI where GitHub was fully "stable" for a month or maybe even a week, and except for that one time with Cocoapods that downtime has always been their own doing.

ekjhgkejhgk• 4 months ago

Fuck GitHub. It's a corporate attempt at owning git by sprinkling socials on top. I hope it fails.

If you need to host git + a nice gui (as opposed to needing to promote your shit) Forgejo is free software.

cortesoft2• 4 months ago

The true value prop of github isn't "hosted git + nice gui", it is the whole ecosystem of contributers, forks, and PRs. You don't get that by hosting your own forge.

Also, I wouldn't say GitHub is a corporate attempt to own git... GitHub is a huge part of why Git is as popular as it is these days, and GitHub started as a small startup.

Of course, you can absolutely say Microsoft bought GitHub in an attempt to own git, but I think you are really underselling the value of the community parts of GitHub.

blitzar2• 4 months ago

Counterpoint: Ai coding without GitHub is like performing a stunt where you set yourself on fire but without a fire crew to extinguish the flames

roncesvalles• 4 months ago

Text is cheap to store and not a lot of people in the world write code. Compare it, for example, to email or something like iCloud.

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).

fxtentacle• 4 months ago

I think the instability is mostly due to the CEO running away at the same time as a forced Azure migration where the VP of engineering ran away. There’s only so much stability you can expect from a ship that’s missing 2 captains.

duped• 4 months ago

I mean the fish rots from the head, but at the end of the day that rot translates into an engineering culture that doesn't value craftsmanship and quality. Every github product I've used reeks from sloppiness and poor architecture.

That's not to say they don't have people who can build good things. They built the standard for code distribution after all. But you can't help but recognize so much of it is duct taped together to ship instead of crafted and architected with intent behind major decisions that allow the small shit to just work. If you've ever worked on a similar project that evolved that way, you know the feeling.

dyauspitr• 4 months ago

That doesn’t make sense. Commits are all text. If YouTube can easily handle 4PB of uploads a day with essentially one large data center that can handle that much daily traffic for the next 20 years, GitHub should have no problems whatsoever.

throawayonthe• 4 months ago

after microsoft acquired it, they greatly expanded the free tier allowances, and they still seem happy to dump money into it

utopiah• 4 months ago

worried for the future of GitHub

Oh no, who would think about the big corporations? How is Micro$lop going to survive? /s

genewitch3• 4 months ago

My friend and I are usually pretty good at ballparking things of this nature; that is "approximately how much textual data is github storing" and i immediately put an upper bound of a petabyte, there's absolutely no way that github has a petabyte of text.

Assuming just text, deduplication,not being dumb about storage patterns, our range is 40-100TB, and that's probably too high by 10x. 100TB means that the average repo is 100KB, too.

Nearly every arcade machine and pre-2002 console is available as a software "spin" that's <20TB.

How big was "every song on spotify"? 400TB?

the eye is somewhere between a quarter and a half a petabyte.

Wikipedia is ~100GB. It may be more, now, i haven't checked. But the raw DB with everything you need to display the text contained in wikipedia is 50-100GB, and most of that is the markup - that is, not "information for us, but information for the computer"

Common Crawl, with over one billion, nine hundred and seventy thousand web pages in their archive: 345TB.

We do not believe this has anything to do with the "queries per second" or "writes per second" on the platform. Ballpark, github probably smooths out to around ten thousand queries per second, median. I'd have guessed less, but then again i worked on a photography website database one time that was handling 4000QPS all day long between two servers. 15 years ago.

P.S. just for fun i searched github for `#!/bin/bash` and it returned 15.3mm "code", assume you replace just that with 2 bytes instead of 12, you save 175MB on disk. That's compression; but how many files are duplicated? I don't mean forks with no action, but different projects? Also i don't care to discern the median bash script byte-length on github, but ballparked to 1000 chars/bytes, mean, that's 16GB on disk for just bash scripts :-)

i have ~593 .sh files that everything.exe can see, and 322 are 1KB or less, 100 are 1-2KB, 133 are 2-10KB, and the rest - 38 - are >11KB. of the 1KB ones, a random sample shows they're clustering such that the mean is ~500B.

ticulatedspline• 4 months ago

Veracity unconfirmed, but this article asserts that until they did some cleanup they were storing 19 petabytes.

https://newsletter.betterstack.com/p/how-github-reduced-repo...

maybe sourced from this tweet?

https://x.com/github/status/1569852682239623173

Edit: though maybe that data doesn't count as your "just text" data.

madrox3• 4 months ago

I don't think the issue at hand is a technical challenge. It's merely a sign, imo, that usage has surged due to AI. To your point, this is a solvable scaling problem.

My worry is for the business and how they structure pricing. GitHub is able to provide the free services they do because at some point they did the math on what a typical free tier does before they grow into a paid user. They even did the math on what paid users do, so they know they'll still make money when charging whatever amount.

My hunch is AI is a multiplier on usage numbers, which increases OpEx, which means it's eating into GH's assumptions on margin. They will either need to accept a smaller margin, find other ways to shrink OpEx, or restructure their SKUs. The Spotifies and YouTubes of the world hosting other media formats have it harder than them, but they are able to offset the cost of operation by running ads. Can you imagine having to watch a 20 second ad before you can push?

ccgreg• 4 months ago

Common Crawl, with over one billion, nine hundred and seventy thousand web pages in their archive: 345TB.

Common Crawl is 300 billion webpages and 10 petabytes. I suppose your number is 1 of our 122 crawls.

theteapot• 4 months ago

Why is this interesting?

Joel_Mckay9• 4 months ago

The LLM content piracy to isomorphic plagiarism business loop is unsustainable. Yet for context search it is reasonably useful. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

mrlonglong• 4 months ago

Codeberg if you hate AI.

echelon• 4 months ago

I wonder if there's a critical failure mode / safety feature of our species for some percentage of the population to always dislike whatever some other large percentage of the population likes.

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.

mrweasel2• 4 months ago

It could be tied to the "wandering gene" which is believe to ensure that we spread out and don't get stuck in some local optimization.

hk1337• 4 months ago

How long does it normally take projects to get stars though? You're not going to have a project with 100+ stars overnight or even within a month, you have to promote the project?

JanisErdmanis• 4 months ago

Depends widely on the target audience. In my case, targeting Julia developers who want to package their applications into installers to reach 100 stars took 2 years - https://peacefounder.org/AppBundler.jl. If I were to target Python developers, I would have many more stars.

ModernMech2• 4 months ago

It depends on how much you promote your repo and how big it is. I know when my repo gets posted somewhere because I'll get a little burst of stars for a few days and then it'll calm down until it's posted somewhere again. Much larger repos will get stars at a more constant rate as they reach a critical liftoff velocity.

jamesfinlayson3• 4 months ago

My most popular repo is reasonably niche, is 10 years old and has a bit over 40 stars and that's from pretty much no advertising.

monster_truck• 4 months ago

I cannot understate how much of an improvement that is. If I had a dollar for all the shit I made myself, the old fashioned way, that got 0 attention at all? I'd have enough for a month or two of claude

adhipg• 4 months ago

Isn't that expected as well?

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?

bredren• 4 months ago

Some of the comments point toward genuine concern, some smell of gatekeeping.

It is interesting to see a flip in attitude toward GitHub.

largbae• 4 months ago

What percentage of non-Claude-linked output hours to repos with <2 stars?

sy26• 4 months ago

embarrassing

jostmey• 4 months ago

Claude is only as good as the prompts it’s given

knicholes• 4 months ago

So wait, 10% is going to repos w>2 stars?

tkgally3• 4 months ago

It looks like my one-star repository [1] came close to making this person's leaderboard for number of commits (currently 5,524 since January, all by Claude Code). I'm not sure what that means, though. Only a small percentage of those commits are code. The vast majority are entries for a Japanese-English dictionary being written by Claude under my supervision. I'm using Github for this personal project because it turned out to be more convenient than doing it on my local computer.

[1] https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1

sillysaurusx• 4 months ago

This is awesome. Your repo is now two stars.

tkgally3• 4 months ago

Thanks! The dictionary should be more or less finished in a few months. If you or anyone else might find it helpful for studying Japanese, feel free to use it, copy it, and adapt it however you like.

nuker• 4 months ago

Make your own Github: forgejo.org

One used Lenovo micro PC (size of a book) from eBay will serve you well.

tkgally3• 4 months ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I didn’t know about forgejo.org.

The main convenience of Github for me is the ability to send preprepared prompts to Claude through its web interface or the mobile app and have it write or revise a batch of dictionary entries in the repository. I can then confirm the results on the built website, which is hosted on Github Pages, and request changes or reverts to Claude when necessary. Each prompt takes ten to thirty minutes to carry out and I run a dozen or more a day, and it is very convenient to be able to do that prompting and checking wherever I am.

When I have Claude make changes to the codebase, I find that I need to pay closer attention to the process. I can’t do that while sitting in restaurant or taking a walk like I do with the prompting for dictionary-entry writing. The next time I start a mostly (vibe) coding project, I’ll look into Forgejo.

mrweasel2• 4 months ago

Just don't put it online, because the AI scrapers will find it and crawle it so aggressively that your mini/micro-PC will blow up.

convexly• 4 months ago

This is just base rate neglect though. Something like 98% of all GitHub repos have <2 stars regardless of how they were made. If 90% of Claude repos have <2 stars that actually means they're outperforming the baseline...

louiereederson7• 4 months ago

Just to clarify as OP, the point here is not that Claude is not contributing to serious work, just that the dashboard suggests a lot of usage in public GitHub repos seems to be tied to low attention, high LOC repos. This is at least something to keep in mind when considering the composition of coding agent usage, and when assessing the sustainability of current trends.

In hindsight the headline was a bit more sensational than I meant it to be!

roadside_picnic• 4 months ago

This seems to be the same misunderstanding about agentic coding I see a lot of places.

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.

iamandoni• 4 months ago

I can’t imagine that will stay the case though. I built https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect as a first step to using agentic coding in a more production ecosystem. Agents will be able to write useful (and high quality) software over time, their training has just under-prioritized code quality thus far

theshrike793• 4 months ago

Most of my stuff is in public repos because if my crap is useful to someone, yay!

Otherwise I've always used Github as a backup for my code pretty much - and a way to sync my stuff between computers in a controlled matter.

If someone stars my repo, cool. I don't get any notification for those and really don't care. I personally use stars as bookmarks for "this might be cool to try out".

rodspeed2• 4 months ago

I'm one of those zero star repos. I've been using Claude Code for some weeks now and built a personal knowledge graph with a reasoning engine, belief revision, link prediction. None of it is designed for stars, its designed for me. The repo exists because git is the right tool for versioning a system.. that evolves every day.

The framing assumes github repos are supposed to be products.

ctoth• 4 months ago

Hold on. I'm in the middle of building this[0]! What the heck? Your email isn't in your profile -- reach out.

[0] https://github.com/ctoth/propstore

rodspeed2• 4 months ago

Wait a minute! Ha, just saw this. The knowledge graph I mentioned is a separate project (heartwood on my profile). Different angle from propstore but I think we're circling the same problem, conflicting claims that shouldn't be silently resolved. Added my email to my profile now.

https://github.com/rodspeed/heartwood

pshirshov• 4 months ago

Yeah, but all these internal and not so internal tools I baked with it are great - they solve my own problems - and without LLMs I would never have a chance to implement even 20% of that.

noisy_boy• 4 months ago

I think time for AI Free Code (AIFC™) mark has arrived.

schergr• 4 months ago

Yeah. Because they are mostly private I suspect.

pixelpoet• 4 months ago

I hate everything about this headline and metric. As a lifelong graphics programmer from Pentium U/V pipeline assembly optimisation days: so fucking what.

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.

RayVR• 4 months ago

Who cares?

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.

Real_Egor• 4 months ago

- 90% of Claude's repos have <2 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.

phendrenad2• 4 months ago

Stars ceased to be relevant a long time ago, around the time Github went from a beloved pillar of the open-source community to just another facet of the Microsoft behemoth.

celeryd• 4 months ago

Guess I better make a third alt

ChicagoDave• 4 months ago

Why do I care if someone stars my repos? I use GitHub for source control.

voltagex_• 4 months ago

When we need to archive GitHub when it shuts down, I wonder if I'll need to exclude 30 billion lines of slop.

lukaslalinsky• 4 months ago

Is this surprising in any way? People who let Claude Code attribute commits to itself are probably vibe coders who delegate all the work. It's expected that there will be a growing number of new projects.

Fpailo2• 4 months ago

the most of them have zero stars..

Aeolun• 4 months ago

Of course my claude repos have zero stars. Most of them were created in the past 4 months.

SebastianSosa1• 4 months ago

Has always been true. 90% of effort is going to repost with less than 2 stars hasn't changed

rustybolt• 4 months ago

Eh yeah, duh? I've been drilled to put every fart on GitHub. 98% of my repositories have 0 stars.

rovr138• 4 months ago

While you have the base rate fallacy, it might also be that people with a bit bigger repos might be paying closer attention.

I disabled all the attribution. I find it noisy and I'm not blaming claude, I'm blaming someone if something is broken.

faangguyindia3• 4 months ago

One of the guys these days told me he's using claude code and developed 20 projects in last 4 weeks.

I asked him, how many people are using any of them? He told me it's just him.

itchynosedev• 4 months ago

I am not sure it's meant to be a negative thing. Obviously, a lot depends on the context here.

But, I've developed a dozen or so projects with Claude code. I am meant to be the only user.

I am maintaining a homelab setup (homelab production environment, really) with a few dozen services, combination of open source and my own - closed sourced - ones.

I had tons of ideas of how to set things up. It evolved naturally, so changing things was hard. Progress was quite slow.

Now, I have a pretty much ideal end-state - runs on auto-pilot, version bumps mostly managed by Renovate, ingress is properly isolated and secured (to the extent I am familiar of).

I was able to achieve things I wouldnt've otherwise in that time. I skipped parts I did not care about and let LLMs drive the changes under supervision. I spent more time on things I did care about, and was interested in learning.

Yeah, most of my LLM code is sitting closed source and that's by design.

faangguyindia3• 4 months ago

None of your original products are actually closed.

If you go on other account and ask LLM about your projects you'll pretty much get all the code you wrote using LLM again.

That's my gripe with LLMs, most of my friends across the globe are working on similar projects. They are 90% same. You are burning tokens thinking they are doing some new innovation.

I pretty much google for things if they exist, i don't build them.

I'd like to see projects in spaces where nothing exists like a good CAD for 3d printing etc...opensource. but nobody is building all that.

polyterative• 4 months ago

I have developed five applications for my Mac using claude that I made for myself. I'm perfectly happy with the setup. The projects help me solve daily problems. I could never have had the time or the skill to do them myself.

Depurator• 4 months ago

I'm pleasantly surprised that rust is the fifth most popular language. It is indeed a joy to work in rust with Claude compared to e.g. python.

amelius• 4 months ago

Until you encounter circular references. And then suddenly you're working on mundane memory stuff for the rest of the day.

ionwake• 4 months ago

I was about to say what’s wrong with one star lol

micromacrofoot• 4 months ago

who uses stars

jelder• 4 months ago

Who goes out of their way to “star” a GitHub repo, and what does that even mean? Is it a “like” button, a tip jar, or a bookmark? Does this bare any relationship to the importance, quality, novelty, trustworthiness, or any other property of the repo other than number of stars?

What a dumb metric to focus on.

Magnets• 4 months ago

Everyone too busy arguing about the stars issue and not noting how claude really took off since Jan 2026

ako• 4 months ago

What is the claude linked repo with the highest number of stars?

Acacian• 4 months ago

The base rate argument here is the right one. I maintain a solo project with 3,800+ tests and 92% coverage — zero stars for months because I never promoted it. Stars measure marketing, not quality.

What's more interesting to me is that Claude dramatically lowers the barrier to _testing_, not just writing code. I can mass-generate edge case tests that I'd never bother writing manually. The result is higher-quality solo repos that look "abandoned" by star count.

Is anyone tracking test coverage or CI pass rates for AI-assisted repos vs traditional ones? That seems like a much more useful signal than stars.

LtWorf• 4 months ago

And when you think you have no users, try to make a release that crashes at start and you'll get a bugreport within minutes :D

theshrike793• 4 months ago

The test amounts (and quality) in my personal projects has went WAAAY up.

A tiny utility I would never have bothered even setting up a test framework for before has about a 100 tests today. Which is really good because I tend to abandon stuff that Just Works in the background and come back to them in a year.

Having a bunch of tests makes me feel better about changing things without breaking other stuff.

marginalia_nu• 4 months ago

I'd expect much the same of the hand-written code.

GitHub stars are very much the textbook example of where you'd expect to find a Pareto distribution.

mark_l_watson• 4 months ago

I think the value right now in LLM code assist tools is in small projects: small reusable libraries or proof of concept “I want this app even though almost no one else does” types of projects.

For libraries: still probably mostly useful for personal code bases, but for developers with enough experience to modularize development efforts even for personal or niche projects.

I am bothered by huge vibe coded projects, for example like OpenClaw, that have huge amounts of code that has not undergone serious review, refactoring, etc.

ruptwelve• 4 months ago

All my repos have at least 1 star! :)

agentictrustkit• 4 months ago

One downstream effect of "agents can publish code" is that the trust signals weve relied on for years (stars, maintainer reputation, issue history...etc) got noisier. I don't think that means the ecosystem collapses, but it could mean we need to separate provenance from popularity.

If an automated system is going to generate and then publish artifacts at scale, you gonna want a verifiable chain of custody. Like which principle authorized the pub, what policy constraints applied (I mean like license scanning, dependency allowlist...etc), an then what checks passed (tests, static analysis, supply-chain provenance). Without this the default consumer posture becomes "treat everything as untrusted," whidh is expensive and slow adoption of legitimate work too.

I suspect we end up with something like "signed built receipts" becoming normal for small projects as well, not because everyone loves ceremony, but becauses the alternative is an arms race of spam and counterfeit maintainers.

theshrike793• 4 months ago

I have 90 Github repos since way over 10 years ago, one of them has over 5 stars (50 stars and 30 forks), since it's a semi-popular niche application with a complicated install path.

Two have over 2 stars, one of which is vibe-engineered, the other is older than my children and the service it's an API for hasn't existed in half a decade.

Am I an AI?

armandososa• 4 months ago

One of the first thing I did with Claude Code was to tell it to never credit itself in commits. Same with other AI coding tools.

90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars

Related Stories