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Posted by louiereederson 5 hours ago

90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars(www.claudescode.dev)
145 points | 80 comments
Aurornis 3 hours 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 3 hours ago||
My reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!
nickcw 3 hours ago|||
The first thing I do when I make a new repo is star it myself ;-)
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago||
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obama-awards-obama-a-medal
sleepybrett 2 hours ago|||
I have a few dozen org repos, of course none of them have stars, who stars their corporate repos?
blitzar 35 minutes ago||
> who stars their corporate repos?

workers on the management track

tlogan 3 hours ago|||
The actual number is that 98% have less than 2 stars (0 or 1). About 90.25% has zero stars.
jwpapi 25 minutes ago|||
You should check recent commits, because obviously there are a lot of forked 0 star repos.
ZeWaka 1 hour 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

wetoastfood 2 hours ago||||
How do you know that?
tlogan 2 hours ago||
https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/
Bratmon 1 hour ago|||
[flagged]
Levitz 38 minutes ago|||
It is relevant because if the vast, vast majority of repos have 2 or less stars then it's not that weird that a great deal of repos linked are, too, 2 or less stars.
hluska 54 minutes ago|||
Are you embarrassed? If not, you should be. This is absolute trash.
ttul 2 hours ago|||
Yeah. Most of my public repos have 0 stars. Most of what I write sucks.
Joel_Mckay 2 hours 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

strongly-typed 1 hour ago|||
Doesn’t matter if the recruiter doesn’t call you back because you’re not a 1000x engineer.
Joel_Mckay 45 minutes ago||
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

racl101 1 hour ago|||
+1 star for ttul
zahrevsky 1 hour ago|||
Off topic, but it reminds me of another principle: every geographic heatmap is just a population map. https://xkcd.com/1138/
jamesfinlayson 1 minute ago||
Yep, every time I see a heatmap of Australian lotto winners - very high correlation with Australia's population.
runarberg 2 hours 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.

madrox 2 hours 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.

petcat 1 hour 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.

philipp-gayret 1 hour 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.
louiereederson 2 hours 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
progmetaldev 1 hour 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.

madeofpalk 2 hours ago|||
Does anyone actually know? So far I've just seen people guessing, and seeing that repeated.
pojzon 1 hour ago||
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.

blitzar 32 minutes ago|||
Counterpoint: Ai without GitHub is like performing a stunt where you set yourself on fire but without a fire crew to put it out
hungryhobbit 2 hours 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.
phantomCupcake 2 hours 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.

ekjhgkejhgk 1 hour 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.

furyofantares 3 hours ago||
100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.
ramoz 2 hours 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/

heavyset_go 4 minutes ago||
Lol @ the proprietary license, you can just copy and use whatever Claude-committed code you want to from that repository.
mjr00 2 hours 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...

sanex 2 minutes ago|||
It is pretty damn fast though.
a-dub 2 hours 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.
wrqvrwvq 42 minutes ago||
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.
throwaway27448 3 hours 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.
heavyset_go 28 seconds 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"
thorum 2 hours 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.
robarr 2 hours 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.
zadikian 2 hours 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.
ianbutler 2 hours 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.

ModernMech 1 hour 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.
tkgally 46 minutes 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

monster_truck 1 hour 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
xnyan 3 hours 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.
maxbeech 3 hours ago||
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.
phantomCupcake 2 hours ago|
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.

adhipg 1 hour 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?

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