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

louiereederson

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

tombert

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

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

xnyan

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

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

user3939382

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

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

Aurornis

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.

Computer0

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

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

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

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

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.

throwaway27448

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.

anon7000

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

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/

madrox

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.

theteapot

Why is this interesting?

mrlonglong

Codeberg if you hate AI.

hk1337

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?