I stopped using GitHub stars to rank AI tools. Here's what I use instead.

GitHub stars are a trap. Not in the "popularity doesn't equal quality" sense - that's obvious. I mean something specific: for a daily AI tools digest, stars are a lagging signal that made my feed worse, and it took me three months to notice. Here's the decision I made last week: I removed GitHub stars as a ranking input for ai-tldr.de entirely. This is what happened, and what I replaced it with. The problem with stars When I built the first version of the digest, I used stars as a tiebreaker. Two repos released the same week? The one with stars floats up. Seemed reasonable.