Comment by rpdillon
8 hours ago
Agree! My longstanding metric uses just two values:
* Most recent commit
* Total number of commits
This might have to die in the era of AI, but it's served me well for a long time. Rather than how many people are paying attention, it tries to measure the effort put in.
> This might have to die in the era of AI,
Sadly that is probably true.
At the very least I'd add release cadence to it and the quality of releases. Mature, good software will have hotfixes and patch releases every now and then. But not in every release and certainly not 50% of the changes. In the same sense I will often look at the effort put in changelogs. If they took the effort of putting things in category, writing about possible breaking changes, etc it is a possible indicator of some level of quality. At the very least I will have a lot more faith in software with good changelogs compared to something that is just a list of the last N commit messages.