It feels like there’s a new tool, framework, or SaaS product every hour. That feeling isn’t wrong. I looked at a bunch of signals to validate this feeling: Show HN launches, GitHub repos, npm, Rust and PyPI package registries, even Product Hunt, the rate at which people ship new things is accelerating. Here’s the data.

Show HN: the shipping rate is accelerating

Not every one might read Hacker News, but if you’re in the tech scene it’s hard to miss. There is a specific type of post called ‘Show HN’ where someone can show their project. If you’ve build an online (side-)project you want to share with the world this is one of the first places to go.

In January 2023, about 1,000 people per month posted a “Show HN,” sharing something they built. By December 2025, that number hit 3,500. By February 2026: 6,200. Not just more HN posts overall: the share of Show HN in all stories tripled, from 3.6% to nearly 13%. People aren’t just posting more, they’re building more. Looking at month-over-month growth you can see that growth has been accelerating since the release of Claude Code and especially the newer Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 models.

GitHub: new repos per month

These days, if you’re working on anything with AI, you’ll need a repository and Github is still the place to go for that. At first glance the chart looks like a normal increase in the total number of repositories, until you realise it’s the number of new repositories per month. In other words, the growth of new repositories, new projects, is accelerating like crazy.

In January 2023, about 3 million new public repos were created on GitHub. By late 2025, that was consistently above 5.5 million per month. February 2026 hit nearly 7 million: a clear acceleration that tracks with everything else we’re seeing. The rate of new repo creation roughly doubled in three years, something that’s even clearer when you look at the month-over-month growth.

Package registries: where (somewhat) completed projects go

Another way to share your new project or tool with the wider world is to turn it into a package and distribute it through one of the major registries. I’ve looked at PyPI for Python, npm for JavaScript, and crates.io for Rust. I think submitting a package is a good indication of someone trying to solve a problem in a way that’s re-usable for others.

These aren’t downloads or installs: they’re new things people made and shared. PyPI added 130,000 new projects in 2025 alone. Crates.io tells a similar story: the Rust ecosystem’s 241,422 total crates are growing at an accelerating pace.

Npm of course, wouldn’t be npm if it didn’t have it’s own dumpster fire hidden in the data. Most of the internet depends on npm and thus it’s one of the most widely used package registries. However, that popularity comes with a set of security challenges that have, let’s say, been challenged over the years. There have been plenty of supply chain attacks, spam and other types of security issues in the npm ecosystem. If you’re interested in the juicy details of one of those attacks, Endor Labs has a great write-up detailing how they uncovered that crypto-mining attempts behind the flood of spam packages known as the IndonesianFoods worm.

I’ve tried to create a relevant line that takes out a bunch of this spam, but you’ll still have to take it with a grain of salt. One thing that does seem in line with the other registries is that even when npm introduced two-factor authentication for packages last December, the number of new monthly packages is still climbing. This should mean it’s not just automated spam package creation with packages laying dormant for weeks or months as it was for the IndonesianFoods worm, but a more realistic number of packages from actual builders.

Product Hunt: fewer launches, or a platform story?

Product Hunt tells a different story: launches dropped from ~1,400/month in mid-2023 to ~400-500/month by 2025. But this looks like a platform decline, not a creation decline. Product Hunt went through layoffs in 2024 and lost mindshare to alternatives. Meanwhile, Show HN grew 4x in the same period. Builders didn’t stop shipping: they moved platforms.

Open source and research: fueling the fire

Feeling anxious about AI is not just from seeing a new product pop up every minute. It is also from feeling like you’re behind on what’s the state of the art. Computer Science and AI papers are one way of tracking that. CS paper submissions to arXiv grew from ~59K in 2020 to ~137K in 2025: more than doubling in five years. But the real impact isn’t necessarily the papers themselves: it’s that each paper increasingly comes with a GitHub repo, a package, or a Hugging Face model. As well as a lively Twitter / X discussion on the topic.

One with everything

When you put all monthly time series on the same scale, the pattern is unmistakable. Show HN is the most extreme signal, but Crates.io (~3.6x) and PyPI show the same upward shape. The inflection starts in mid-2025 and keeps steepening into Q1 2026.

So yes, you’re right to be anxious

Across every credible signal: new repos, new packages, new Show HN posts, new research, the rate of creation is accelerating. Not linearly, but with a visible elbow starting early 2025. The feeling that you can’t keep up isn’t a personal failing. It’s a real shift in how much gets shipped.

The next question of course is whether we can keep up with it. Not just our technical infrastructure but also our ability to distinguish between genuine improvements and AI slop.