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

Posted by louiereederson 9 hours ago

90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars(www.claudescode.dev)

187 points | 109 commentspage 3

maxbeech 6 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 6 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.

hk1337 6 hours 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 6 hours 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.

ModernMech 5 hours 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.

convexly 4 hours 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...

tombert 7 hours 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.

bredren 5 hours ago||

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

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

anon7000 6 hours 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.

largbae 5 hours ago||

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

Computer0 7 hours 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.

knicholes 4 hours ago|

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

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