Where new GitHub projects outpace the active market
Two equal cohorts of 695 repositories reveal which themes are disproportionately strong among new projects compared with the established, actively maintained ecosystem.
Agent development remains the strongest structural gap
ai-agent represents 11.2% of new projects versus 2.3% of the active market. Claude Code is 5.3 times stronger, Codex 14 times, and agent-skill 8.2 times. Expanding the sample strengthened rather than overturned the original finding.
Emerging edge versus active market
Share of all repositories in each cohort using the topic.
Three leading layers
Agent infrastructure
ai-agent and agent-skill both outpace the installed base, indicating a distinct infrastructure category.
Agentic software development
Claude Code, Codex, and coding-agent are disproportionately strong among new repositories. Software development remains the principal agent market proving ground.
Local-first as an adjacent shift
local-first represents 1.6% of the new cohort and is absent from the active baseline. It is a small but independent early layer, supported by the separate runtime study.