GitHub repos
The most-starred AI GitHub repositories among developers (October 2026)
OpenCode passes 218,000 stars and leads our ranking of 20 AI repositories for developers; coding agents account for 40% of all stars (GitHub API, October 20, 2026).
On October 20, 2026, we used the GitHub API to record the stars, forks, declared licence and last push date of 20 public repositories that matter to developers who code with AI. The full ranking, filterable by type, is on our AI GitHub repositories page.
Method
Three criteria: the repository is about AI for developers (coding agents, editors, open models, inference, agent frameworks, MCP, evaluation); it has more than 5,000 stars; it received at least one push in the last twelve months and is neither archived nor declared read-only. All figures come from the GitHub API (documentation), checked on 2026-10-20. A star signals a GitHub user's interest in a repository: it is neither a usage metric nor a mark of quality.
The top 10
- 1. OpenCode (anomalyco/opencode): 218,744 stars, 29,184 forks, MIT.
- 2. Ollama (ollama/ollama): 184,067 stars, 18,450 forks, MIT.
- 3. Transformers (huggingface/transformers): 167,911 stars, 34,922 forks, Apache-2.0.
- 4. Open WebUI (open-webui/open-webui): 156,281 stars, 22,749 forks, project-specific licence.
- 5. Claude Code (anthropics/claude-code): 152,673 stars, 26,709 forks, proprietary licence.
- 6. LangChain (langchain-ai/langchain): 148,143 stars, 24,862 forks, MIT.
- 7. llama.cpp (ggml-org/llama.cpp): 131,835 stars, 24,598 forks, MIT.
- 8. Codex CLI (openai/codex): 130,181 stars, 20,519 forks, Apache-2.0.
- 9. Gemini CLI (google-gemini/gemini-cli): 107,470 stars, 14,744 forks, Apache-2.0.
- 10. vLLM (vllm-project/vllm): 94,386 stars, 23,660 forks, Apache-2.0.
Next come Zed (91,957), the MCP reference servers (91,419), OpenHands (91,404), Cline (70,722), CrewAI (59,922), Aider (49,663), LangGraph (43,592), the MCP Python SDK (24,624), gpt-oss (20,479) and SWE-bench (6,063).
What the figures show
Coding agents lead. The seven agents on the list (OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenHands, Cline, Aider) total 820,857 stars, or 40% of the 2,041,536 stars across the 20 repositories. Inference and local runtime tools (Ollama, Open WebUI, llama.cpp, vLLM) follow with 566,569 stars.
Young repositories at the top. Four of the top nine are agents whose repository was created in 2025: Claude Code (February 22), Codex CLI (April 13), Gemini CLI (April 17) and OpenCode (April 30), according to the creation date returned by the API. Relative to its age, OpenCode has gained about 12,400 stars a month on average since it was created, against about 1,750 for Transformers, created in October 2018 (OrigoTech calculation from the API figures).
More forks on the infrastructure side. The fork-to-star ratio reaches 25% for vLLM and 21% for Transformers, against 13% for OpenCode and 10% for Ollama. A fork is often the starting point of a contribution or an in-house adaptation; on its own, this ratio says nothing about the number of contributors.
Near-continuous activity. 18 of the 20 repositories received a push in October 2026. The two exceptions: SWE-bench (last push on September 18, 2026) and Aider (May 22, 2026), whose latest published release is still v0.86.0 from August 9, 2025 (GitHub).
Licences: not all open source
Nine repositories use MIT and seven Apache-2.0. Four are exceptions: Claude Code, whose licence file reads “© Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved” and refers to Anthropic's commercial terms; Open WebUI, under a project-specific licence; Zed, which combines GPL and Apache licence files; and the MCP servers, transitioning from MIT to Apache-2.0 according to their LICENSE file. A heavily starred public repository is not necessarily free software.
Who is missing
Some popular repositories do not meet our criteria: DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 have had no push since August and June 2025; the Continue README states the repository is no longer actively maintained and is read-only; Microsoft's AutoGen README announces an archived project; Roo Code is archived on GitHub.
Limits
Stars add up from the day a repository is created: they measure accumulated popularity, not current usage. They also leave out installs via npm, Homebrew or editor extensions. To compare agents on substance, see our analysis of open-source coding agents on GitHub and the OpenCode, Aider and Cline comparison.
Takeaway: across 20 major AI repositories, coding agents hold 40% of the stars, and four of them are less than two years old.
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