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

claudescode.dev

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

#231

Post by louiereederson »

Aurornis wrote: post #11

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.

OP. I'm not a confident SQL user so encourage someone to double check this. From what I can tell have been 2.21x10^12 additions on GitHub in total, 6.36x10^11 of which are in repos with 2+ stars. That's about 29%. People earlier were comparing the star distribution of repos which is not really what this is about - it is about OUTPUT, as measured by additions.

Interestingly, there are 21.37b commits in GitHub, implying 104 additions per commit. Per the dashboard, Claude is linked to 20.81m commits and 50.44b additions - or 2,424 additions/commit. So additions for Claude-linked repos is higher, and it's actually higher for repos with 0-1 stars (2,568 additions/commit for Claude, 91 for all GitHub). None of this is a smoking gun but aligns with the intuition that Claude is producing enormous amounts of code. TBD whether it is 'adding value'.

Would be appreciative of anyone who verifies/invalidates this. https://play.clickhouse.com/ https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/#clickhouse-demo-access

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

#232

Post by genewitch »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #229
genewitch wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend and I are usually pretty good at ballparking things of this nature; that is "approximately how much textual data is github storing" and i immediately put an upper bound of a petabyte, there's absolutely no way that github has a petabyte of text. Assuming just text, deduplication,not being dumb about storage patterns, our range is 40-100TB, and that's probably too high by 10x. 100TB means that the average re…

Veracity unconfirmed, but this article asserts that until they did some cleanup they were storing 19 petabytes. https://newsletter.betterstack.com/p/how-github-reduced-repo... maybe sourced from this tweet? https://x.com/github/status/1569852682239623173 Edit: though maybe that data doesn't count as your "just text" data.

yeah i assume all the artifacts[0] and binaries greatly inflate that. I have no idea how git works under the hood as it is implemented at github, so i can't comment on potential reasons there.

Is there some command a git administrator can issue to see granular statistics, or is "du -sh" the best we can get?

0: i'm assuming a site-rip that only fetches the equivalent files to when you click the "zip download" button, not the releases, not the wikis, images, workers, gists, etc.

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

#233

Post by ebiester »

faangguyindia wrote: post #184
Aurornis wrote: post #11

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.

When I first got a job, I asked the company okay, how many people are going to use the code i write? If the answer wasn't in hundreds of request per seconds, i wasn't interested in job. I found job at ad tech companies, pay wasn't any good but the challenges were immense. Most people write code, which will hardly be run by other people or even receive any customers.

One of the products my employer builds is used twice a year. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of using it twice a year. It's tremendously valuable to be used twice a year.

Value and use are not always synonymous.

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

#234

Post by LtWorf »

Acacian wrote: post #214

The 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 sol…

And 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

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

#235

Post by madrox »

petcat wrote: post #60
madrox wrote: post #31

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…

In a (possibly near) future where most new code is generated by AI bots, the code itself becomes incidental/commodotized and it's nothing more than an intermediate representation (IR) of whatever solution it was prompt-engineered to produce. The value will come from the proposals, reviews, and specifications that caused that code to be produced. Github is still code-centric with issues and discussions being auxilliar…

I think you're directionally correct, but this stuff still has to live somewhere, whether the repo is code or prompts. GitHub is actually pretty well-positioned to evolve into whatever is next.

I don't think GitHub's product is at risk, but its business model might.

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

#236

Post by Joel_Mckay »

flexagoon wrote: post #205
gnabgib wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't what that shows, and the article you linked to even warns: > In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of denoting specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas. Dunning-Kruger has also been discredited with suggestion they may have been over confident themselves: The Dunning-…

Are you replying to the wrong comment? The person you're responding to seems to make the same point

Self-reported studies are arguably weaker evidence, but are common in some areas for ethics reasons. In general, if errors are truly random, than they will cancel out over larger/frequent population samples.

The study conclusion inferred the skills needed to be effective at some task, are the same skills needed to correctly evaluate if you are actually proficient at the same tasks.

Or put another way, the People are not as unique as they like to believe, and spotting problems is trivial after you meet around 3000 people. Best to avoid the nonsense, and get outside to enjoy life. Have a great day =3

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

#237

Post by madrox »

genewitch wrote: post #223
madrox wrote: post #31

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…

My friend and I are usually pretty good at ballparking things of this nature; that is "approximately how much textual data is github storing" and i immediately put an upper bound of a petabyte, there's absolutely no way that github has a petabyte of text. Assuming just text, deduplication,not being dumb about storage patterns, our range is 40-100TB, and that's probably too high by 10x. 100TB means that the average re…

I don't think the issue at hand is a technical challenge. It's merely a sign, imo, that usage has surged due to AI. To your point, this is a solvable scaling problem.

My worry is for the business and how they structure pricing. GitHub is able to provide the free services they do because at some point they did the math on what a typical free tier does before they grow into a paid user. They even did the math on what paid users do, so they know they'll still make money when charging whatever amount.

My hunch is AI is a multiplier on usage numbers, which increases OpEx, which means it's eating into GH's assumptions on margin. They will either need to accept a smaller margin, find other ways to shrink OpEx, or restructure their SKUs. The Spotifies and YouTubes of the world hosting other media formats have it harder than them, but they are able to offset the cost of operation by running ads. Can you imagine having to watch a 20 second ad before you can push?

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

#238

Post by Joel_Mckay »

alickz wrote: post #191
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but knowing something sucks means you are probably reasonably competent at coding. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Even if you're not correct, I respect your positivity and constructive attitude It's good to raise people's expectations of themselves

Self-reported studies are arguably weaker evidence, but are common in some areas for ethics reasons. In general, if errors are truly random, than they will cancel out over larger/frequent population samples.

The study conclusion inferred the skills needed to be effective at some task, are the same skills needed to correctly evaluate if you are actually proficient at the same tasks.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02151

If the data infers another explanation is more applicable, than I'd be interested in the primary papers/studies the editorialized opinion seems to have omitted. =3

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

#239

Post by agentictrustkit »

One 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.

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

#240

Post by akoboldfrying »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #121
akoboldfrying wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would anyone settle for The answer to such questions is always that, given their circumstances, they have no realistic choice not to. This is very obvious, and it's frustrating to continually see people pretend otherwise.

> they have no realistic choice not to If folks expect someone to solve problems for them, than 100% people end up unhappy. The old idea of loyalty buying a 30 year career with vertical movement died sometime in the 1990s. Ikigai chart will help narrow down why people are unhappy: https://stevelegler.com/2019/02/16/ikigai-a-four-circle-mode... Even if folks are not thinking about doing a project, I still highly recom…

> If folks expect someone to solve problems for them

In this type of situation, the fundamental issue is that making progress depends on many people acting in unison to increase their bargaining power, which is (a) hard to arrange even if everyone who acted this way would benefit, and (b) actually may be detrimental to some people (usually the high performers).

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