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.

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.

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

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

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/

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why is this interesting?

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.

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.

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”.

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

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

Codeberg if you hate AI.