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simonwtoday at 7:17 AM4 repliesview on HN

41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".

https://tools.simonwillison.net/github-repo-stats?repo=OpenC...


Replies

sdevonoestoday at 11:10 AM

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

krater23today at 12:59 PM

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...

timrtoday at 8:11 AM

Seriously? Commit count is right up there with lines of code as a classically dumb measurement of productivity.

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mjr00today at 8:14 AM

> 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

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