Star count on github no longer tracks adoption. mattpocock/skills has 10.1k stars this week and…
star count on github no longer tracks adoption. mattpocock/skills has 10.1k stars this week and zero users in production at any company i know. meanwhile the actual agent teams are quietly forking 200-line scripts.
the trending page is now a leaderboard for vibes, not for what ships.
Context
The mattpocock/skills repository is MIT licensed and showed 247,112 stars when read, and a mer.vin report dated 6 September 2026 places it at number 2 on GitHub's daily trending list. A paper, Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars on GitHub, accepted at ICSE 2026, studies suspected fake stars across GitHub.
The 10.1k stars this week is unverified, as it is for the repository's other note. The fake-stars paper supports that stars can be inflated in general. It does not study adoption of this repository and does not show that stars no longer track adoption. Zero users in production at any company the author knows, and teams forking 200-line scripts, are the author's own claims with no inspected evidence. A leaderboard for vibes is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Social Proof is in the Pudding (arXiv) ↗Study of social proof and open source adoption; snippet only, not read.
Watch next
- Adoption data for the repository beyond star counts.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 6 September 2026 at 05:05 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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