I keep seeing the comment that if AI is making engineers so productive, why can't we see it in publicly available numbers like new github repositories? And I believed that, until I checked it a few days ago, and as far as I can tell, we maybe can see it.
Look:
It seems to me that since December 2024 (after o1, around the time of Deepseek V3 and R1, shortly before Claude Code), the number of new repositories created per month is going up faster than it used to.
Does this prove anything? Not really, but just looking at Github's official data doesn't really reject the idea either.
Sadly Commits are less useful as a Github metric, because when you fork the a 15 year old repository, you're adding 15 year old commits to Github, so the long history is unrepresentative. But recent history might be a tad more representative. And that also seems to be going up faster.
Would be interesting to scrape data more directly and see commits coauthored with Claude.
For now, I made a little page where I'll keep fetching daily data from GH to show these numbers: Github Stats.