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Comments (112)

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  Aurornis
  Perfect example of a base rate fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacyWhat percentage of GitHub activity goes to GitHub repos with less than 2 stars? I would guess it's close to the same number.
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  madrox
  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.
• furyofantares
  100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.
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  louiereederson
  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!
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  throwaway27448
  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.
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  ramoz
  Shout out to Broadwayscore by thomaspryor@githubAt 2mo old - nearly a 1GB repo, 24M loc, 52K commitshttps://github.com/thomaspryor/BroadwayscorePolished site:https://broadwayscorecard.com/
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  tkgally
  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
• RayVR
  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.comAuto 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
  - 90% of Claude's repos have <2 stars- 98% of human's repos have <2 starsClaude is 5 times smarter than humans!The math is a bit of a stretch, but the correlation still holds up.
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  rodspeed
  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.
• xnyan
  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.
• monster_truck
  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
• pixelpoet
  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.
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  embedding-shape
  I'd betcha a lot more than 90% goes to repositories without any stars at all, or even public code!
• adhipg
  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?
• pshirshov
  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.
• mikkupikku
  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.
• schergr
  Yeah. Because they are mostly private I suspect.
• chrisweekly
  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.
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  maxbeech
  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.
• noisy_boy
  I think time for AI Free Code (AIFC™) mark has arrived.
• claytonia
  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.
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  hk1337
  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?
• anon
  undefined
• convexly
  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...
• bredren
  Some of the comments point toward genuine concern, some smell of gatekeeping.It is interesting to see a flip in attitude toward GitHub.
• anon7000
  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.
• largbae
  What percentage of non-Claude-linked output hours to repos with <2 stars?
• Computer0
  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.
• knicholes
  So wait, 10% is going to repos w>2 stars?
• jostmey
  Claude is only as good as the prompts it’s given
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  tombert
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• user3939382
  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”.
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  theteapot
  Why is this interesting?
• sy26
  embarrassing
• Vektorceraptor
  guilty :) 1 Star here - and even that is worthless
• pugchat
  [dead]
• null_author
  [dead]
• gurachek
  [dead]
• aplomb1026
  [dead]
• Mooshux
  [dead]
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  mrlonglong
  Codeberg if you hate AI.
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  dev_l1x_be
  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.
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  louiereederson
  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