AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects

Sean Goedecke, who works at GitHub, found that AI coding tools have roughly doubled the number of modestly used software projects while very popular projects show no change.

Sean Goedecke, a software engineer at GitHub who writes about the craft, asked why AI coding tools have not produced a wave of impressive new software. He compared about twenty platforms that publish install counts, such as plugin directories and game-mod sites, across 2022 to 2024 and 2025 to 2026. Projects with modest use grew, while very popular projects did not.

• On the NVDA screen-reader add-on directory, new add-ons with more than 1,000 downloads roughly doubled, with no change above 10,000.
• New Steam games with more than 100 reviews were about 60% more common.
• He argues that large products already have the visible features users want and are hard for coding agents to change.
• Google Play and WordPress plugins did not show the same pattern.

That teams with a large, mature product should expect little visible change from AI coding tools is an inference and is not the author's claim.

17 October 2026: AI output that looks finished at first glance still needs a named person who checks it against something real, and teams now plan their work around that check.