The Building Boom
Something big is happening and most people haven't noticed the scale of it. Look at the number of new public GitHub repositories created each month.
In February 2026, developers created 6.8 million new public repositories. Three years earlier, it was 2.9 million. That is not a gentle trend. That is a surge.
What is driving it? AI coding models are getting dramatically better. The chart below tracks the best coding score at the time of release, across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Source: Artificial Analysis. If you want to know how Coding Index is calculated, more is here.
In just over three years, the coding ability of leading LLMs grew more than 5x. And it's not just coding. Overall intelligence scores are climbing too.
Yet even the best model in this benchmark scores 57%. There are many tests and benchmarks, and models perform better on some than others, but roughly speaking, today's best AI solves about six out of ten hard coding challenges. Plenty of room to grow.
The effect shows up everywhere. Look at Product Hunt launches, where builders ship new products every day.
Show HN posts, where builders share what they have made, tell the same story.
npm package downloads are surging as developers pull in more dependencies for new projects.
Next.js, the most popular framework for building web apps, shows the same pattern.
Now put it all together. Each metric is normalized to the same 0 to 100% scale so you can see the trends move together.
Many real projects live in private repos. And plenty of builders aren't sharing yet. I think the true change is even steeper.
The bottom line
The trend is clearly visible, even with just a few data dimensions. The building boom is here.
Given the billions investors have recently committed to AI, 2026 will likely bring another major jump in LLM intelligence and coding ability.
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.
