Open almost any repo on this week's board and the latest commit line carries two avatars: a person and the word “claude”. The question worth measuring is how much of the actual code is AI-written. I took the 30 most recent commits of the 12 most-starred repos and counted co-authors.
How it was measured
A commit counts as AI-written if its message carries a `Co-Authored-By:` line pointing at Claude, Codex, Cursor, Devin, Copilot or Gemini, or if the committing account is `claude`. This undercounts: people can use AI without crediting it, but cannot credit it without using it.
The result
- 246 commits sampled, 52 with an AI co-author — 21.1%.
- But only 4 of the 12 repos have any AI commit at all. The other 8 have zero.
- The distribution is extremely skewed: aerial-tv (5,226 stars) is 28 of 30 AI commits; ikow/php2shell-poc is 12 of 13; android-ad-cleaner is 11 of 30.
- gpu-unlock-ada (2,931 stars), hatchzip (1,955), reylo (1,269) and 9bie/php2shell-bypass-aslr-exp (1,440): zero AI commits in their last 30.
How to read it
The 21% does not mean “a fifth of new open-source code is AI's”. It means: when a new repo is written agent-first, nearly every commit belongs to the agent; when it is not, the rate is 0. There is no even spread in between.
- AI-first repos tend to be apps, CLIs and desktop apps — where an agent can write a lot of code without understanding the system underneath.
- The 0% repos in this sample are a kernel module (gpu-unlock-ada), a Rust tool with CI on three platforms (hatchzip), an exploit PoC (9bie), and a TypeScript framework (reylo).
- aerial-tv is the clearest case: 293 commits, 22 contributors, 51 tags — and 28 of its last 30 commits written by an agent. A real project with real review, where the typing was done by a machine.
What this changes about the leaderboard
If an agent can write 28 commits in an afternoon, then “5,000 stars in six days” is no longer evidence of six days of work. It is evidence of a well-timed idea plus one person who knows how to drive an agent. Commit count — the metric I still used to separate real software from posted content — has also become cheap.
Metrics that still hold: independent contributor count, closed issues, and whether a second person reviews the code. aerial-tv has 22 contributors and 258 open issues — that is a live project, which is not something commit count can tell you any more.
Sources: the GitHub REST `commits` endpoint for the 12 most-starred repos in the set of 615 created after 19 October 2026, reading `Co-Authored-By` in the commit message; data as of 26 October 2026. See also the full 615 repos.