Comment by d1l
6 hours ago
15 years ago GitHub was a strong signal for like-minded devs who were of the “let me code and slide pizza under the door” variety. The signal became less meaningful over time so people started optimizing for other things…stars, whatever. Brand. I think the venn diagram of front end marketing types and the explosion of js frameworks probably was the driver for this. Now with vibed out projects everywhere it’s a real task to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I still use gh because I imagine those stars are still current in some markets but maybe I’m deluding myself.
Or, Perhaps the invention of the rocket emoji most likely was the cause of this phenomenon.
The signal of quality for me is the number of contributors and the age of the repo. If I see a repo that's several years old and has many contributes over that time it's very likely a reputable project with some value. If I see a 1 month old repo with one user who has dumped the whole thing and then done nothing since, it's likely vibeslop that will be abandoned in a month.
I recently made this mistake. It was my own fault.
Went looking for a thing, saw some Reddit chatter, decided to try it out.
After all the setup and such I realized it was vibecoded and poorly designed. Just monster gaps they obviously didn’t think about and can’t realistically fix.
I should have paid closer attention. Checked the repo… couple months old, no real activity after the first week or so, basically the only project on the account, issues were all unanswered references to the nasty gap in the design.