AI Coding Boom 2026: GitHub Repos, npm Downloads, and Product Hunt Launches Are Surging
In February 2026, developers created 6.8 million new public GitHub repositories. Three years earlier, it was only 2.9 million.
This is not a one-time spike. Every month, more and more repositories are being created.
What is driving it?
The chart below shows the best coding score of LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Source: Artificial Analysis. If you want to know how Coding Index is calculated, more info is here.
In just over three years, the coding ability of leading LLMs grew more than 4x. And it's not just coding. Overall intelligence scores are climbing too.
I think the most noticeable change happened around November 2025 when Anthropic released Opus 4.5 and Claude Code, and OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.2. All of this together drastically improved how well leading LLMs write code and drove builders to give them another try.
The effect shows up everywhere. Look at Product Hunt launches.
Show HN posts on Hacker News tell the same story.
Some may say bots are behind the posting, and that might be partly true. But take a look at the numbers below.
According to RevenueCat, three years ago about 2,000 new subscription apps launched every month. Today almost 15,000 apps launch every month.
npm package downloads are surging as developers pull in more dependencies for new projects.
Next.js, a popular framework for building web apps, shows the same pattern.
Now let's put it all together. I normalized each metric to the same 0 to 100 scale so you can see the trends move together.
Many real projects live in private repos. So, the true change might be even steeper.
The bottom line
I only picked a few metrics. We could also look at PyPI downloads and many other sources. But even this slice shows a clear trend.
The building boom is here. People are experimenting and building. Yes, we can debate the quality of what they are building, but that is a separate conversation. One thing is evident to me. People are building at an unprecedented pace.
Given the billions investors have recently committed to AI, 2026 will likely bring another major jump in LLM intelligence and coding ability. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
About The Author:
Val Kamenski is a fractional CTO, board advisor, and startup mentor with over 14 years of experience building and scaling software companies. He now helps founders and executives make better technology decisions, and navigate the fast-changing world of AI and software development.
