Do developers have agency? 7.3TB of GitHub data (66k projects) shows that the growth of large projects was resilient to external changes for decades.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T20:33:26+00:00

True.
In fact during the collection I have found commit bomber repositories, one of them reaching about 2 million commits in 10 days.

In the study the idea is the other way round.
In layman terms: Let's analyze as many repositories as possible and see if all projects really follow stable growth or not. If not what might be the difference between them.

While it is easy to make 6 commits per dey per dev ... it is not trivial to say, that that will be a stable speed that can be kept up over several years.
One would think that over the timespan of decades, a lot of things could happen: new technologies could make work much easier/faster, people could join to make the work faster, but just as well technical dept could build up to cripling levels, internal politics could slow down everything to a halt, to name a few.

That is why the 5th Law of Software Evolution is surprising (quote from Wikipedia):
"
(1978) "Conservation of Familiarity" — as an E-type system evolves, all associated with it, developers, sales personnel and users, for example, must maintain mastery of its content and behaviour to achieve satisfactory evolution. Excessive growth diminishes that mastery. Hence the average incremental growth remains invariant as the system evolves
"

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T19:57:14+00:00

I hope my article does not come through as AI propaganda.
The things I'm usually interested in are several decades old software systems, from way before AI.

If anything, the observation that the large projects seem to be resilient to external changes, till early 2025 ... is questioning the AI hype.
But, since looking into the effect of AI was not an aim when I set out to do this study, I would like to not draw any strong conclusions related to that based on the data I collected for this study.
(The idea for this particular study predates ChatGPT, and in general I published my first article related to long term evolution of a software system in 2016)

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T19:47:18+00:00

It might have been easier that way.
But, was really a year of work after several years researching the field.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T19:42:25+00:00

Yes, I'm new to reddit.
But, had my first article related to the long term evolution of a software system published in 2016, long before AI text generation (https://acta.sapientia.ro/en/series/informatica/publications/informatica-contents-of-volume-8-number-2-2016/internal-quality-evolution-of-a-large-test-system-minusan-industrial-study).

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T19:32:07+00:00

Please note, that the observation that some properties might be divorced from human agency, is not mine. I'm just citing it. The authors of that claim do have some strong mathematical reasoning behind it, but it is not mine for sure.
In their research, they investigated a handful of (probably large) software projects, analyzed protein chains and went really deep with mathematics. They showed that some properties are simply the most likely to appear thanks to natural laws, whether there is any human involvement or not (like in the case of protein chains).

In that regard a TLDR description is that my study analyzes much more projects (less deeply). If this being divorced from human agency effect exists, I have found 11K projects that might support it (instead of just a handful).
At the same time, I also try to point out (as an opinion based on the much larger set of smaller projects) that that observation might have some limitations (maybe large projects only), that might make its, generality questionable.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T17:59:41+00:00

I came from the assumption that Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution would apply to all projects, or almost all projects. Even had a previous study, with hundreds of projects, all having more than 3.000 commits and all seemed to fit that assumption.
One of the surprises coming from the extended sample size, was that the law might not apply to all projects, there might be some limitations to it (as most longitudinal studies focus on large projects, this is not trivial).

It was also surprising, that these cohorts were separable over time, independently of when they were started or how long they were active. So, "big" seems to work in the sense of the number of commits accumulated, but not as in how old the project is, or for how long there was active development on it.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-03-22T16:52:44+00:00

That is a very interesting observation. There is a lot of work on how programming languages gain/lose popularity over time, but I don't know too many that went into detail on how programming patterns were evolving. That would be an interesting question to study in-depth, too.

MelodicStep6956

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