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

https://www.claudescode.dev/?window=since_launch

85•louiereederson•4h ago

Comments

louiereederson•4h ago

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

phantomCupcake•1h ago

Thanks for starting the conversation and sharing my dashboard. :)

louiereederson•37m ago

I hope you don't mind, I thought this was a really valuable dashboard.

phantomCupcake•33m ago

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.

tombert•2h 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.

embedding-shape•1h ago

I'd betcha a lot more than 90% goes to repositories without any stars at all, or even public code!

phantomCupcake•1h ago

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.

xnyan•1h 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.

furyofantares•1h ago

100% of all code I have put on github, using claude or not, is on repos with zero stars.

user3939382•1h ago

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”.

Vektorceraptor•1h ago

guilty :) 1 Star here - and even that is worthless

Aurornis•1h 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•1h ago

My reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!

nickcw•1h ago

The first thing I do when I make a new repo is star it myself ;-)

Imustaskforhelp•1h ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obama-awards-obama-a-medal

sleepybrett•26m ago

I have a few dozen org repos, of course none of them have stars, who stars their corporate repos?

tlogan•1h ago

The actual number is that 98% have less than 2 stars (0 or 1). About 90.25% has zero stars.

wetoastfood•1h ago

How do you know that?

tlogan•1h ago

https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/

Bratmon•24m ago

Wait, you just answered a completely different question and pretended it was relevant!

I can play that game too: The average elephant eats 500 pounds of vegetation a day, therefore most AI interaction on Github is fake.

ZeWaka•18m 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

ttul•1h ago

Yeah. Most of my public repos have 0 stars. Most of what I write sucks.

Joel_Mckay•48m 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

runarberg•49m 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.

Computer0•1h 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.

mikkupikku•1h ago

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.

dev_l1x_be•1h ago

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.

chrisweekly•1h ago

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.

maxbeech•1h 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•1h 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.

throwaway27448•1h 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.

thorum•1h 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.

zadikian•1h 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.

robarr•1h 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.

ianbutler•38m 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.

anon7000•1h 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.

ramoz•1h 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/

mjr00•1h 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...

a-dub•51m 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.

madrox•1h 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.

hungryhobbit•1h 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•53m 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.

louiereederson•52m 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

madeofpalk•33m ago

Does anyone actually know? So far I've just seen people guessing, and seeing that repeated.

theteapot•54m ago

Why is this interesting?

Joel_Mckay•37m ago

The 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

mrlonglong•41m ago

Codeberg if you hate AI.

echelon•12m ago

I 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.

hk1337•37m 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•32m 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.

monster_truck•24m 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

adhipg•17m 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?

bredren•15m ago

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

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

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

Comments

Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars

The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos

ARC-AGI-3

Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm

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

My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary

Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

Quantization from the Ground Up

Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000

Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy

TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression

FreeCAD v1.1

Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Goodbye to Sora

Health NZ staff told to stop using ChatGPT to write clinical notes

Ball Pit

Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

Antimatter has been transported for the first time

VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

Tracy Kidder has died

Looking at Unity made me understand the point of C++ coroutines

Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote

Flighty Airports

Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms

Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller

Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC