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90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars
- furyofantares 7mo ago100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.
- Maxion 7mo agoSomeone in our org starred our main repo, so for me this isn't true.
- wombat-man 7mo agoYeah, 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. :-)
- Vektorceraptor 7mo agoguilty :) 1 Star here - and even that is worthless
- louiereederson 7mo agoToggling 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501348
- phantomCupcake 7mo agoThanks for starting the conversation and sharing my dashboard. :)
- louiereederson 7mo agoI hope you don't mind, I thought this was a really valuable dashboard.
- phantomCupcake 7mo agoNot 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.
- jonahx 7mo agoDashboard looks nice. Was this a Claude creation or did you instruct it to use a certain template or CSS framework?
- Mooshux 7mo ago[dead]
- tombert 7mo agoI 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 7mo agoI'd betcha a lot more than 90% goes to repositories without any stars at all, or even public code!
- phantomCupcake 7mo agoAbsolutely! 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 7mo agoI 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.
- user3939382 7mo agoAt 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”.
- Aurornis 7mo agoPerfect example of a base rate fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 7mo agoMy reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!
- nickcw 7mo agoThe first thing I do when I make a new repo is star it myself ;-)
- bingemaker 7mo agoTell me about it!
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obama-awards-obama-a-medal https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obama-awards-obama-a-medal
- snthpy 7mo agoHalf way there
- jrod87 7mo agoI think this is best practice.
- cess11 7mo agoDidn't know I could do that, I assumed it wouldn't be permitted. This likely tripled the amount of stars I have.
- sleepybrett 7mo ago
- Computer0 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoMaybe 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 7mo agoDid 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 7mo agoSoftware production yes engineering no lol
- Fpailo 7mo agoexactly
- chrisweekly 7mo agoEven 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.
- maxbeech 7mo ago[flagged]
- phantomCupcake 7mo agoIt 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.
- AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway27448 7mo agoDo 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 7mo agoStars 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 7mo agoI'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.
- throw5 7mo ago> 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.
- anon7000 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoShout out to Broadwayscore by thomaspryor@github At 2mo old - nearly a 1GB repo, 24M loc, 52K commits https://github.com/thomaspryor/Broadwayscore https://github.com/thomaspryor/Broadwayscore Polished site:https://broadwayscorecard.com/ https://broadwayscorecard.com/
- mjr00 7mo agoI 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 7mo agojson 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 7mo agoIt'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.
- sanex 7mo agoIt is pretty damn fast though.
- kevmo314 7mo agoWhat is git if not a database for source code?
- madrox 7mo agoAlready 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 7mo agoOr 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 7mo agoThis. 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.
- louiereederson 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoDoes anyone actually know? So far I've just seen people guessing, and seeing that repeated.
- pojzon 7mo agoI 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.
- theteapot 7mo agoWhy is this interesting?
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoThe 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mrlonglong 7mo agoCodeberg if you hate AI.
- echelon 7mo agoI 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.
- mrweasel 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoHow 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 7mo agoDepends 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 https://peacefounder.org/AppBundler.jl. If I were to target Python developers, I would have many more stars.
- ModernMech 7mo agoIt 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.
- jamesfinlayson 7mo agoMy 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.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- monster_truck 7mo agoI 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
- bredren 7mo agoSome of the comments point toward genuine concern, some smell of gatekeeping. It is interesting to see a flip in attitude toward GitHub.
- adhipg 7mo agoIsn'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?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- largbae 7mo agoWhat percentage of non-Claude-linked output hours to repos with <2 stars?
- sy26 7mo agoembarrassing
- jostmey 7mo agoClaude is only as good as the prompts it’s given
- knicholes 7mo agoSo wait, 10% is going to repos w>2 stars?
- tkgally 7mo agoIt 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 https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1
- sillysaurusx 7mo agoThis is awesome. Your repo is now two stars.
- tkgally 7mo agoThanks! 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nuker 7mo agoMake your own Github: forgejo.org One used Lenovo micro PC (size of a book) from eBay will serve you well.
- tkgally 7mo agoThanks 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.
- gurachek 7mo ago[dead]
- convexly 7mo agoThis 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...
- louiereederson 7mo agoJust 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 7mo agoThis 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.
- steve_shepherd 7mo ago[dead]
- iamandoni 7mo agoI can’t imagine that will stay the case though. I built https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect 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
- theshrike79 7mo agoMost 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".
- rodspeed 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoHold 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 https://github.com/ctoth/propstore
- rodspeed 7mo agoWait 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 https://github.com/rodspeed/heartwood
- pshirshov 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoI think time for AI Free Code (AIFC™) mark has arrived.
- pugchat 7mo ago[dead]
- schergr 7mo agoYeah. Because they are mostly private I suspect.
- _fin6 7mo ago[flagged]
- pixelpoet 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoWho 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.
- null_author 7mo ago[dead]
- Real_Egor 7mo 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.
- matheuspoleza 7mo ago[dead]
- phendrenad2 7mo agoStars 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 7mo agoGuess I better make a third alt
- ChicagoDave 7mo agoWhy do I care if someone stars my repos? I use GitHub for source control.
- voltagex_ 7mo agoWhen we need to archive GitHub when it shuts down, I wonder if I'll need to exclude 30 billion lines of slop.
- lukaslalinsky 7mo agoIs 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.
- patrickRyu 7mo ago[flagged]
- Fpailo 7mo agothe most of them have zero stars..
- Aeolun 7mo agoOf course my claude repos have zero stars. Most of them were created in the past 4 months.
- SebastianSosa1 7mo agoHas always been true. 90% of effort is going to repost with less than 2 stars hasn't changed
- rustybolt 7mo agoEh yeah, duh? I've been drilled to put every fart on GitHub. 98% of my repositories have 0 stars.
- rovr138 7mo agoWhile 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.
- curious1008 7mo ago[dead]
- faangguyindia 7mo agoOne 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 7mo agoI 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.
- faangguyindia 7mo agoNone 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoUntil you encounter circular references. And then suddenly you're working on mundane memory stuff for the rest of the day.
- quangtrn 7mo ago[flagged]
- phantomCupcake 7mo agoIt's a great idea to track releases. Won't be a perfect measure since not all things are packaged on Git, but adding it to the roadmap. Thanks for that.
- gebalamariusz 7mo ago[dead]
- ionwake 7mo agoI was about to say what’s wrong with one star lol
- michaelabrt 7mo ago[dead]
- derodero24 7mo ago[flagged]
- Serhii-Set 7mo ago[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 7mo agowho uses stars
- jelder 7mo agoWho 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 7mo agoEveryone too busy arguing about the stars issue and not noting how claude really took off since Jan 2026
- ako 7mo agoWhat is the claude linked repo with the highest number of stars?
- Acacian 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoAnd 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
- theshrike79 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoAll my repos have at least 1 star! :)
- philbitt 7mo ago[dead]
- agentictrustkit 7mo agoOne 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.
- theshrike79 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoOne 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.