320 tools · 6 signals · 3 hard stops · nothing hand-graded · rescored August 3, 2026
How a tool is scored
Every verdict is a pure function of stored GitHub signals. The same row scored twice gives the same answer.
Three hard stops
| State | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Archived on GitHub | dead, 0/100 | The owner has made the repository read-only. It cannot accept a patch, so activity is not the question. 8 of the 320 tracked repositories are in this state today. |
| Disabled by GitHub | dead, 0/100 | GitHub itself has taken the repository out of service. |
| 365 days without a push | dead, whatever it scores | Twelve months of silence overrides the score. A project can hold a respectable number on release cadence and maintainer count long after the last commit; the commit is what a dependency actually rests on. |
None of the three is a judgement call. Each is a field GitHub reports.
What the verdict is made of
| Signal | Worth | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Commit recency | 0 to −96 | Days since the last push, and the backbone of the whole score rather than one adjustment among six: a push inside a week starts the row at 100, inside a month at 92, a quarter at 72, six months at 55, a year at 32, two years at 12. Past a year the dead verdict is forced outright regardless of everything below. |
| Commit volume | 0 to +6 | Commits in the last twelve weeks. Twenty or more earns 6 and five or more earns 3; below that it earns nothing. It is a credit and never a penalty — silence is already priced by the recency band above, and charging for it twice was the arithmetic error this table used to describe. The GitHub call pages at 100, so a hundred is read as at least a hundred. |
| Release cadence | +4 to −12 | The current release gap measured against the project's own median gap, not against a fixed number. Three times its own cadence is the heaviest penalty here — a project that tagged releases and stopped tagging says more than one that never tagged. Never tagging at all costs two points: it leaves the axis unreadable rather than proving neglect, so it is a small deduction and not one of the heavy ones. |
| Issue response | +9 to −20 | Median time to a first maintainer reply on recent issues, worth +6 to −12, plus the share of sampled issues with no reply at all, worth +3 to −8 once at least eight have been sampled. This is the signal a star count can never carry. Where there are too few recent issues to measure, it scores zero rather than guessing. |
| Maintainer count | +5 to −8 | Distinct people who committed in the last 90 days. Nobody loses 8, one person loses 5 — a single committer is a single point of failure however fast they ship. |
| Licence | 0 or −6 | No licence file is a reason not to depend on a project regardless of how active it is, so it is scored rather than mentioned. A repository that declares one is not credited for it. |
Every point a tool gained or lost is listed on its own record, beside the fact that produced it.
The bands
| Score | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 65 and above | maintained | Recent commits, a release line that is still moving, and someone answering issues. |
| 26 to 64 | slowing | Still open, but at least one of the three has gone quiet. This is the band worth reading the signals for rather than taking the word. |
| 25 and below | dead | Or any of the three hard stops above, whatever the score would otherwise have been. |
The three numbers here are read from the same file the scorer reads, so the table cannot drift from the rule it describes. Add the Effect column on any tool record to 100 and you get that tool's score.
The longest silences on the board
10 tools shown| Tool | Category | Status | Freshness | Last commit | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smol Developersmol-ai/developer | CLI agents | Dead | 0 | 2.3y | 12k |
| AlphaCodiumCodium-ai/AlphaCodium | IDE extensions | Dead | 2 | 21mo | 4.0k |
| SuperAGITransformerOptimus/SuperAGI | Orchestrators | Dead | 0 | 19mo | 18k |
| Aidecodestoryai/aide | IDE extensions | Archived | 0 | 17mo | 2.2k |
| AgentGPTreworkd/AgentGPT | Orchestrators | Archived | 0 | 15mo | 36k |
| GPT EngineerAntonOsika/gpt-engineer | CLI agents | Archived | 0 | 15mo | 55k |
| Devonentropy-research/Devon | CLI agents | Dead | 2 | 14mo | 3.5k |
| bytebotbytebot-ai/bytebot | Runtime & harness | Archived | 0 | 11mo | 11k |
| Devikastitionai/devika | CLI agents | Dead | 22 | 10mo | 20k |
| Plandexplandex-ai/plandex | CLI agents | Dead | 12 | 10mo | 16k |
What this does not claim
Nothing here is hand-graded and nothing is a submitted claim. The scorer reads a row of signals, applies the weights above, and writes back a number, a verdict and the list of facts that produced them. That list is on every tool record, so a verdict you disagree with can be argued with on the evidence rather than taken on trust.
The score is recomputable without re-reading GitHub, which matters for the honest version of the complaint every board like this attracts: when a project resumes real activity, the number moves the night after, on its own, with no appeal to file.
A verdict describes a repository’s public activity. It is not a claim about whether the software works, and a finished, stable tool can score dead and still be the right thing to install — what the board removes is the part where you had to guess. The same figures are available as JSON from the open API.
