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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

#241

Post by Joel_Mckay »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #240
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I agree it is nearly impossible to alter the inertia of existing firms. Most have entrenched process people that defend how things are done right up until a company enters insolvency. Fine if you sell soda or rubber tires, but a death knell for technology or media firms.

In my observations it is usually conditioned fear, personal debt-driven risk aversion, and or failure to even ask if the department above you is really necessary. These days, it is almost always easier to go to another firm if you want a promotion. =3

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

#242

Post by ccgreg »

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…

> Common Crawl, with over one billion, nine hundred and seventy thousand web pages in their archive: 345TB.

Common Crawl is 300 billion webpages and 10 petabytes. I suppose your number is 1 of our 122 crawls.

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

#243

Post by genewitch »

ccgreg wrote: post #242
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…

> Common Crawl, with over one billion, nine hundred and seventy thousand web pages in their archive: 345TB. Common Crawl is 300 billion webpages and 10 petabytes. I suppose your number is 1 of our 122 crawls.

oh, i didn't see that the 1.97 billion pages were crawled in a 11 day period earlier this month. either way, nearly 2,000,000,000 pages fit in ~third of a petabyte...

p.s. thanks for correcting me, i was using this information for something else, and now it's correct!

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

madrox wrote: post #237
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…

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 p…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by alexandre_m »

ebiester wrote: post #233
faangguyindia wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My wife uses me twice a year.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #91
tkgally wrote: post #77

It 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 turn…

This is awesome. Your repo is now two stars.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by theshrike79 »

I 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?

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

#248

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

The 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.

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

#249

Post by theshrike79 »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #94
louiereederson wrote: post #90

Just 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 sensati…

This 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 wa…

Most 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".

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

#250

Post by louiereederson »

tlogan wrote: post #18
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.

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

Funny how everyone gravitated towards analysis of the star distribution of REPOS when the headline claim is on ADDITIONS. If you look at my comment below (invite you to verify the stats), the distribution of additions by star count is far more weighted to 2+ star repos in GitHub overall. The observation is meaningful, up to the observer to draw a conclusion. Is Claude just speeding up output or is it generating piles of spaghetti code with no use? Considering the get rich quick economy that has sprung up around app development, I'm inclined to at least consider the latter.
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