My reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!
The first thing I do when I make a new repo is star it myself ;-)
I think this is best practice.
I have a few dozen org repos, of course none of them have stars, who stars their corporate repos?
> who stars their corporate repos?
workers on the management track
We need to have a talk about your pieces of flair.
The actual number is that 98% have less than 2 stars (0 or 1). About 90.25% has zero stars.
Sounds like Claude commits are, on average, going into higher visibility repositories than humans… maybe the author would like to reconsider their approach?
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
each line (mostly) being equal length provides me an odd comfort
only 80 more repos need 100000 stars and all lines would be equal! e.g.
1 : 14946505
10 : 1196622
100 : 213026
1000 : 28944
10000 : 1847
100000 : 100
power law distribution ~1/x I think
interesting that you only need ~150 stars on a project for it to be in the top 1%
You should check recent commits, because obviously there are a lot of forked 0 star repos.
Yeah. Most of my public repos have 0 stars. Most of what I write sucks.
GitHub Stars (or any online 'star count') is not an indicator of quality.
I guess you linking to it was a self fulfilling prophecy
If you read your own reference really really carefully, you might be able to tell why it so perfectly applies to you
The person with little knowledge overestimates they're capability, and the person which actually knows how complicated [the thing] is , usually isn't as confident they mastered it.
Your take on that makes absolutely no sense
That isn't what that shows, and the article you linked to even warns:
> In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of denoting specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.
Dunning-Kruger has also been discredited with suggestion they may have been over confident themselves:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real (2020) https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...
Debunking the Dunning‑Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they don’t know, but everyone thinks they are better than average (2023) https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-dunning-kruger-eff... the Dunning‑Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they don’t know, but everyone thinks they are better than average
Doesn’t matter if the recruiter doesn’t call you back because you’re not a 1000x engineer.
Why would anyone settle for underpaid positions from an agency taking a 7% contract cut, and purging CVs from any external firm also contracting with their services.
Most people figure out this scam very early in life, but some cling to terrible jobs for unfathomable reasons. =3
> Why would anyone settle for
The answer to such questions is always that, given their circumstances, they have no realistic choice not to.
This is very obvious, and it's frustrating to continually see people pretend otherwise.
> they have no realistic choice not to
If folks expect someone to solve problems for them, than 100% people end up unhappy. The old idea of loyalty buying a 30 year career with vertical movement died sometime in the 1990s.
Ikigai chart will help narrow down why people are unhappy:
https://stevelegler.com/2019/02/16/ikigai-a-four-circle-mode...
Even if folks are not thinking about doing a project, I still highly recommend this crash course in small business contracts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
Rule #24: The lawyers Strategic Truth is to never lie, but also avoid voluntarily disclosing information that may help opponents.
Best of luck =3
Off topic, but it reminds me of another principle: every geographic heatmap is just a population map. https://xkcd.com/1138/
Yep, every time I see a heatmap of Australian lotto winners - very high correlation with Australia's population.
shouldn't a serious heatmap (or any comparative graph for that matter) normalize the stat being displayed versus the baseline population in that bucket?
in otherwords, plot the percentage or average metric and not the absolute metric.
e.g. number of lotto winners per thousand people living in that grid, percentage of starred repos as a percentage of all repos, per capita alcohol consumption, average screen-time etc.
Edit: unless ofcourse the point of the heatmap is to show the population distribution itself. In which case the metric would be number of people per square kilometer or some such.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Running on Azure is not the same as migrating to Azure.
Making big changes like the tech that underpins your product while still actively developing that product means a lot of things in a complicated system changing at once which is usually a recipe for problems.
Incidentally I think that is part of the current problem with AI generated code. Its a fire hose of changes in systems that were never designed or barely holding together at their existing rate of change. AI is able to produce perfectly acceptable code at times but the churn is high and the more code the more churn.
> Its a fire hose of changes in systems that were never designed or barely holding together
Yeah... my career hasn't been that long but I've only ever worked on one system that wasn't held together by duct-tape and a lot that were way more complicated than they needed to be.
Azure is fine, stability wise.
The assumption is it would be mistakes in their migration - edge cases that have to be handled differently either in the infrastructure code, config or application services.
Does anyone actually know? So far I've just seen people guessing, and seeing that repeated.
I dont believe sudden influx of few million bots running 24/7 generating PRa and commits and invoking actions does not impact GitHub.
It even sounds silly when you say it this way.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I'm with you on all points except for it being bought.
Stars get bought all the time. I've been around startup scene and this is basically part of the playbook now for open core model. You throw your code up on GitHub, call it open source, then buy your stars early so it looks like people care. Then charge for hosted or premium features.
There's a whole market for it too. You can literally pay for stars, forks, even fake activity. Big star count makes a project look legit at a glance, especially to investors or people who don't dig too deep. It feeds itself. More people check it out, more people star it just because others already did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
it’s my signal for popular forks
Probably not today, but there was a time when you could get funding based on just a github repo with a bunch of stars.
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...
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.
It's not a terrible storage mechanism but 36,625 workflow runs taking between ~1-12 minutes seems like a terrible use of runner resources. Even at many orgs, constantly actions running for very little benefit has been a challenge. Whether it's wasted dev time or wasted cpu, to say nothing of the horrible security environment that global arbitrary pr action triggers introduce, there's something wrong with Actions as a product.
What is git if not a database for source code?
Meh, then filesystems are databases for bytes. Airplanes are buses for flying.
I could make that argument, but I wouldn’t believe it.
It is pretty damn fast though.
“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.
Lol @ the proprietary license, you can just copy and use whatever Claude-committed code you want to from that repository.
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).
AI output can't be copyrighted, copyright applies to human creations.
Substantive transformation of AI output via human creativity can be copyrighted, but if you're sticking to Claude commits, that's AI output.
So you're suggesting that an AI translation of, say, a novel removes human authorship from the result? Unless a human goes in and makes further "substantive transformations" to the AI generated work?
And if that's not what you are saying then how are you determining that prompts to and AI are not copyrighted by the author of the prompt? The results are nothing more than a derivative work of the prompt. So you are faced with having to determine whether the prompts themselves or in combination are copyrightable. Depending on the prompt they may or may not be, but you can't apply a blanket rule here.
(Notwithstanding that Claude inserts itself explicitly as co-author and the author is listed on the commit as well)
https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...
> The Copyright Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
People have tried over and over again to register copyright of AI output they supplied the prompts for, for example, in one instance[1], someone prompted AI with over 600+ cumulative iterations of prompting to arrive at the final product, and it wasn't accepted by the Copyright Office.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
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
Make your own Github: forgejo.org
One used Lenovo micro PC (size of a book) from eBay will serve you well.
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.
This is awesome. Your repo is now two stars.
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.
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.
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.
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
Why do I care if someone stars my repos? I use GitHub for source control.
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.
I'd betcha a lot more than 90% goes to repositories without any stars at all, or even public code!
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.
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?
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
Guess I better make a third alt
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.
- 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.
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.
the more interesting signal in that data is about intent, not quality. most of these low-star repos probably aren't failed open source attempts - they're personal tools that were never meant to be shared.before ai-assisted coding, the effort-to-build ratio was high enough that most personal scripts stayed on a laptop or in a private gist. pushing to a public repo implied an implicit claim that someone else might want this. now the build cost is low enough that people just push things to git for their own version history and move on.what's actually happening is that git is becoming a personal dev journal as much as a collaboration platform. stars were always a weak proxy for value, but they're especially wrong for this use case.the 90% number probably also undercounts the real extent of this - most serious claude code usage is on private repos and internal tooling that never touches public github at all. the 50b lines stat would look very different if you could see total token output vs just github-public-linked output.
The security implication of this shift is underappreciated. A repo that was never meant to be shared was also never security-reviewed. Personal tools built fast tend to have hardcoded API keys, credentials committed during a "just get it working" phase, and file system access patterns that weren't meant to be public.
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.
It would be very interesting to see how much of this is the "audience of one" type of project - i.e. personal scripts - vs new developers/vibe coders trying to start an app. I have definitely been surprised by the scale of some of the repos that seem to be vibe-coded. People who seem to have no history in development are building game engines, and payroll systems, and Broadway review websites.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Some of the comments point toward genuine concern, some smell of gatekeeping.
It is interesting to see a flip in attitude toward GitHub.
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...
I think time for AI Free Code (AIFC™) mark has arrived.
Yeah. Because they are mostly private I suspect.
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.
What percentage of non-Claude-linked output hours to repos with <2 stars?
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.
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.
Claude is only as good as the prompts it’s given
So wait, 10% is going to repos w>2 stars?
The 2 stars or fewer metric may show one thing. We’re moving from an era of 'open source as a digital monument' to 'open source as a disposable scratchpad.' Not that the code is slop, it’s that the cost of creating a repository has dropped to near zero.
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”.
guilty :) 1 Star here - and even that is worthless
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.
Software production yes engineering no lol
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
Thanks for starting the conversation and sharing my dashboard. :)
I hope you don't mind, I thought this was a really valuable dashboard.
Not at all! The ShowHN didn't really get a lot of feedback but this thread has already given me a lot to think about adding/improving.
Dashboard looks nice. Was this a Claude creation or did you instruct it to use a certain template or CSS framework?
