To be honest, these days I have more faith in an application or library with a moderate development pace where maybe the last commit wasn't 2 seconds ago co-authored by claude (in the most blatant examples).
The same is true for amount of commits, the type of commits, release cadence and the amount of fixes and hotfixes in releases. I don't feel like being a glorified alpha tester so I look for maturity in a project.
Which more often than not means that, yes there needs be activity. But, it is also fine if it was two days ago and there is a clear sign of the same pattern over a longer period. Combined with a stable release cycle, sane versioning and clear changelogs that aren't just a list of the last 10 commit messages.
On your point of stars, I think they used to be a valid metric in a similar category. Namely, community behind the software. But it has been a while since that has been true. It certainly hasn't been for a while, ever since I saw these star tracking graphs pop up on repos I knew that there was no sense in paying attention to them anymore.
There is truth in that. A lot of claude co-authored repos look frantic and unstable. It will still depend on the contributors managing things properly to maintain stability and not succumb to AI addiction and insanity.
> community behind the software
Right. You can't just look at stars. You have to look to see that there is an actual community, along with other contributors.
To be honest, these days I have more faith in an application or library with a moderate development pace where maybe the last commit wasn't 2 seconds ago co-authored by claude (in the most blatant examples).
The same is true for amount of commits, the type of commits, release cadence and the amount of fixes and hotfixes in releases. I don't feel like being a glorified alpha tester so I look for maturity in a project.
Which more often than not means that, yes there needs be activity. But, it is also fine if it was two days ago and there is a clear sign of the same pattern over a longer period. Combined with a stable release cycle, sane versioning and clear changelogs that aren't just a list of the last 10 commit messages.
On your point of stars, I think they used to be a valid metric in a similar category. Namely, community behind the software. But it has been a while since that has been true. It certainly hasn't been for a while, ever since I saw these star tracking graphs pop up on repos I knew that there was no sense in paying attention to them anymore.