41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".
https://tools.simonwillison.net/github-repo-stats?repo=OpenC...
41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".
https://tools.simonwillison.net/github-repo-stats?repo=OpenC...
Didn’t we learn anything from the past? Using loc or number of commits or github stars to measure success or productivity is so backwards. It seems everyone on the AI wagon is either young (and so they don’t know our history) or simply forgot about all the good practices in software engineering
My bashscript can do that in some hours. The git repo contains no working software after that, but when that is what you want to meassure...
> 41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".
I meant a month for the initial release, not current state.
Regardless, much like lines of code, number of commits is not a good metric, not even as a proxy, for how much "work" was actually done. Quickly browsing there are plenty[0] of[1] really[2] small[3] commits[4]. Agentic coding naturally optimizes for small commits because that's what the process is meant to do, but it doesn't mean that more work is being done, or that the work is effective. If anything, looking at the changelog[5] OpenClaw feels like a directionless dumpster fire right now. I would expect a lot more from a project if it had multiple people working on it for 5 years, pre-AI.
[0] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/e43ae8e8cd1ffc07...
[1] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/377c69773f0a1b8e...
[2] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/ffafa9008da249a0...
[3] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/506b0bbaad312454...
[4] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/512f777099eb19df...
[5] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
That's why my original comment said:
> (Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)
I brought up OpenClaw here because the challenge was:
> we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".
Seriously? Commit count is right up there with lines of code as a classically dumb measurement of productivity.
Sure, but it's still a good counter to "a month of work".
No it isn't. There's basically no upper bound on the number of commits an LLM can generate. If the LLM takes 10,000 commits to do what a human would do in 10, then the comparison is meaningless.
I don't know anything about the code quality of OpenClaw, but telling me the number of commits tells me precisely nothing of use.
OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors.
I expect there is no number I could bring up here that won't be instantly shot down as telling "precisely nothing". My mistake for bringing up any numbers at all.
OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them.
I'm surprised this is a hill I have to die on, but there we are.
(I'm not even a user of OpenClaw! I don't think it's secure or safe enough to use in my own life.)
It isn’t man. Anyone can easily split a single good commit into 10 just to inflate the numbers. C’mon, this is 101 git