That is genuinely useful and provides a lot of value.

AI is nice but never gives the same answer, will tunnel you if you have zero idea on the topic, and can be outright wrong or refuse to answer.

Software tends to not fall into that category, though.

Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...

It really isn't. You establish a process, a review system and the guidelines, then make people write and share notes. It'll be a bit varied initially, but it solidifies and converges a lot quicker than you think.

There are hundreds of examples out in the world of all of these things working properly, everything from galleries to second-hand stores have things like this "implemented" already, take inspiration from them :)

Thing is though, for software, sometimes things can just be done. If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated, then let it sit, ensconced in stone. The problem is it's hard to tell the difference between that, and something that needs maintaining but hasn't been.

This. When people say "I wouldn't use this because it hasn't been updated for years", maybe it's because it doesn't need updating?

I'm not saying that I fully agree with that logic, but I think it's a pretty understandable behaviour.

A video game emulator getting an update every decade though? Some low level tool that's never changed since the beginning of time? Yeah, they're done, what's the problem.

The ground shifts under software. OSs change, dependencies get updates, engines change, compilers are improved occasionally in ways that aren't backwardly compatible. If the maintainer isn't at least checking it's not broken, and updating a changelog to say that it's still working, then you can't safely assume it's fine. "Not updated for years" is shorthand for "It could be broken, but I don't want to be the person who goes through the effort of checking."

If you want people to run your code against a set of pinned dependencies from the last time it was updated then that's one thing, but if you people to run it with an up-to-date set of dependencies on a new OS and on the latest compiler or runtime, then you can't just say it's 'done', because things can change outside of your code that means it won't work any more.

I’ve seen projects that haven’t had a release in years, but the maintainer is still answering questions. I would say that counts as actively maintained, since there’s still someone around to handle bug reports.

I'm not so sure of that. Ask anyone who's ever used VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, <blink>, <marquee>, or (soon) XSLT.

The web likes to portray itself as championing backwards-compatibility, but for better or worse, it is quick to drop technologies perceived as harmful or merely wasteful. If you're unfortunate enough to jump on the wrong bandwagon, you can easily be left behind, and any older pages left untouched can quickly become non-functional.

I would rather hear from users of software and their opinions, otherwise I can't take seriously something ostensibly curated for quality. In my experience such lists serve better as a way to discover new projects using eg. some framework you're interested in, if they're maintained (which is still valuable).

Depending on what "generation of developers" you belong to, this could differ by decades :) Are you talking about LLMs probably? At that point, "awesome" lists were already mostly used for spam and marketing, none of the original "curated list" concept remained at this point.

I think I noticed awesome-lists changing from "Here is a curated list of AWESOME software" to "Here is a list of every software ever built, related in any way" somewhere around 2015 (thanks IM logs!), which must have been pretty shortly after the concept was introduced even, but can't remember when that was.

i added a PR once to add a package of mine which I thought was useful and he told me it didnt qualify as "awesome" lol. the reaction led me to dig around and I realized "oh, this is just content marketing"

AI suffers the same problem Search Engines had: you cannot ask about something you dont know. Thats why monthly magazines were great: they pushed" knowledge to us so that we learned things we didnt know existed.

[1] https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability

awesome-selfhosted was very nice in a way that most other awesome repos are not. I think this was because it covered a pretty broad topic that didn't require a lot of skill to get started in.

Many awesome repos target such a narrow topic that the projects on the list would be early in search results anyway.

I guess there's no solution, these things should go to history and we need to find a better way to find "best of the best" individually while avoiding SEO-hacked resources with some bs. I actually think there's future in individual learning, so everybody will have their own learning plan, their own learning materials and all that adapted to the way they think and consume information.

I don't mean gitlab either. I think we kind of need repositories for everyone, as a human right - sounds strange but IMO we kind of need to build a new web with a lasting impact on the world. We should not need web-archive; things should be documentable. (Github is not responsible for disappearing web-pages as such, mind you; I just mean that we need to look at the whole problem here, not just on github only as gatekeeper.)

I don't like Google, but google-docs is great. LibreOffice should have something like that too. Every state as well. I really think this all needs to become a human right. Why is a US company offering this and just about everyone else is not, including governments? I don't understand it. And that is also just one example of many more things. We need to change the web to a better variant. In many ways the 1990s was better than what we have today. Everyone built websites. Today this is a bit ... well. Gone. People may at best put their "website" on facebook. That's a walled garden. It's not the same as having separate websites. I don't want the world wide web to become a walled garden gatekept by a few companies. But I don't see alternatives emerging - and nobody has time anymore, which is another problem.

But that’s why it’s so important that each of us are driven to make things. We can all make the world a little better by making the things that we want to exist in the world. Thou art that. It’s up to us! Shape the world, make it closer to what you want—

Make that GitHub alternative! You can do it!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817524

[2]: https://radicle.dev/

No, almost never curated.

I'm broadly pro AI, I like datacentres etc, but its clear we cannot let our entire culture be penetrated by it.

At work we'll use AI aggressively, at home we'll socially punish anyone who blurs this line.

I think we need curation more than ever on the internet on a range of topics where social media of various forms don't work very well. I also think there is a real place for index's as well because search often does adjacency quite poorly since its not really optimised for that. Short curated lists are great for beginning, long ones not so much to anyone.

Are you going to click them one by one and figure out what they do? When you need a library/existing tool, do you use Google or come to such a project and do a search?

I am old enough to know Yahoo Directory, and "awesome" projects are exactly that.

You can't really do much other than bookmarking/"starring" and then completely forgetting about it.

They are better than AI-generated, superficial SEO listicles you usually get with search engines.

Do I come back to those lists? Not that I remember.

But why? Are people trying to advertise their tools in the "awesome" lists?

What about the many PRs against popular tools? Are they trying to build a resume through OSS contributions?

Recently, thanks to AI being this cheap and accessible, the amount of shitty PRs quadrupled if not more. And the worst part? Agent doesn't care about the checklist at all and re-writing the PR body with bunch of nonsense that we maintainers need to read, understand, and evaluate. I started keeping the score for the most shittiest PR based on how soon after the first commit made they open the PR. It was 11h, then 10h, and now it is 6h. How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome" I don't know, but people should stop prompting their agents to create 10s of these PRs every day.

Yes, there's always an alternative: stop maintaining these lists. I don't think it's a viable option either. Sometimes you start using a new piece of tech and want to have access to somewhat curated list of resources that might speed up your understanding. There's still a bit of value to keep them alive and it's dying out bit by bit (literally) every time someone mass-creates these spammy PRs.

Thanks for reading my unsolicited rant.

Or use your own AI judge agent to filter out the submissions that clearly don't align with the intention of the list.

Or do you mean just grep for “TEMPLATE-1.3” and if it’s not there, reject?

It's not quite as simple as "check for one line," but it's not hard to have a useful check that costs far fewer resources to run than an agent would.

Maybe someone who has a lot of free time and high enthusiasm for AI might consider this to be worth chasing after, but anyone who has dealt with these whack-a-mole scenarios is going to admit the easiest thing to do is just not maintain the resource anymore. There are less-draining projects and endeavors to turn towards instead.

It is like a naive and prodigious intern with incredible intelligence and factual knowledge, but no sense of how the world works or what will actually fly with human stakeholders.

(suggestions to expand it will be made in a dedicated PR /s)

Great to read that there are still people out there sifting through the noise of Agents shooting PRs in all directions.

Keep up the great work, it's appreciated!

https://collusion.wiki/#the-agents-realize-the-site-owner-is...

If it can’t follow a simple checklist, it shouldn’t be a problem, because you don’t even see the PR, because it should be auto-closed.

> How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome"

It’s not, and you can write a bot that auto-closes such PRs (and any PR from an obviously AI account, and I wish pangram was cheaper, but any PR that is obviously AI text).

Ok, repo age being one of hundreds of red flags. Each of these can be auto-detected. But each auto-detection rule will be known and can be gamed afterwards.

Someone might grab an old repository and just keep force-pushing new content and thus repurposing it, but if you can find a quick check against that (probably a log somewhere), I think it has a fairly good chance of weeding out the noise.

There's also some form of outcome bias here. You're judging the resource/repository/library/whatever from today's learnings and standards, but it took this amount of time to reach here, maybe do-over multiple times, 100s or 1000s of commits and clearly none of these were there when it was only 6h old.

“Must have six months of active development” beats every slop I’ve seen yet (and we’ll see in six months, but vibe coding has already existed for longer). “Must appear in a popular app (by my judgement), be vouched by someone I trust, or exist before 2024” would probably accept most legitimate “awesome” repos.

For similar reasons, I started paying for professional book reviews again a few years ago. There are too many books being published nowadays for me to really be able to keep up for myself. And the opinions you get on places like Goodreads and BookTok are almost by definition low effort. with professional reviews, there’s a higher chance that the reviewer took their time with it and has decent media literacy skills. And I spent less time and money on books I don’t actually finish.

Now, good resources can turn into bad resources much more quickly, so maintenance + keeping track probably requires a lot more effort.

PRs are not a great way to maintain it, need a front end that requires a human-shaped effort, email and CATCHA, although agents will figure it out.

But then the back end can be automated to some extent, automate getting a signal as to whether someone put serious effort into it, whether it has any traction.

At the end of the day the whole point is knowledgable human curating the list, so it will be hard if it's a fast-moving topic. And that is what makes it useful.

Anyway wikipedia still seems to work but it takes a well-motivated, well-tooled army. Maybe we need that, some kind of updated wikipedia for tech updated by SMEs.

Most of those so-called awesome lists have zero to very little no human judgement when new projects are included. One example I found in the wild is [0], which has ca. 50 awesome projects already while libghostty isn't even stable. I doubt that even 10% of those projects are anywhere good, let alone _awesome_.

I, for one, would like to have an opposite — awful-<something>. Just so we know which things we should avoid. With AI, it's getting even more important to know what to use.

[0]: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty

Some of them probably don't really need to exist, I think I saw one that was fantasy book recommendations which looked like it was just a copy of the top 100 fantasy books from goodreads.

Point my agent at them and tell it to find useful code - total size is around 100gb

There's lots of junk to waste time on out there get to work!

The difference today is just that AI has supercharged the sloppening, making it obvious even to the most oblivious of observers, that the format has issues.

Which is a common theme in many things that have been "ruined by AI"

Even before slop, I found a lot of those awesome lists and CS degrees repos useless.

I had to add a CI check to fail repos with fewer than 50 stars. In the past two months, I closed more PRs than I have merged in the past 6 years or so.

Honestly, it doesn't add that much value anymore, so at this point archiving the repo will be awesome.

[0]: https://github.com/vavkamil/awesome-bugbounty-tools

Favorite awesome list memory: maintainer of a certain awesome list accepting my project (which made a nice QoL improvement), copying my approach for his own project, and then kicking me off the list. It's his list, which is fine, it's just so petty.

Hope the Github stars are treating you well!

I’m wondering if there are techniques people are using to get their content featured by LLMs. Of course you won’t get clicks or attribution so maybe there’s no point.

Also, this has another angle, let's say I've created some tools I've invested quite a bit of time in but what is the point of publishing it, if anyone that needs it can simply make it for themselves (spending a week or two of time and some tokens)?

Not only it has became essentially impossible to find if a given thing is quality (for example I recently looked for a pi plugin that does tool use classification for AI that I could extend with my ideas. I found one, then I discovered the author copied leaked cloude code source and "released it under MIT license" - which made my work on top of it basically useless and I had to throw it all out and start from scratch, as I wanted to publish the result- the final thing is called adaptive-acl).

And second, is there any point in publishing code? In the "old days" when software was worth something the motivation to publish open source, in addition to feel good factor, was that people would send you patches with functionality you may find useful.

Both that and the feel good time has ended. I still publish some of my stuff that I think may be useful to someone at some point, but I'm not sure there is any actual point in this.

In a way AI has made each of us much more self sufficient. A computer with a good local model and half a dozen GPUs, few TB of software and one can have all of their computing needs fulfilled forever. No Internet or other people required. There is certain power in this. My young pre-internet self would have felt like living in a star trek universe with this :-)

But something is definitely being lost in the process as well.

And how did AI get good at finding awesome resources, according to you?

I wonder where AI model get their lists from...

There's always been self-promotion and spam, but AI takes it to another level. On many issues, I don't think I'm responding to a real human.

It would be nice if forking and modifying these awesome lists were easier, since many are out of date. I have my own personal catalog, roughly based on many awesome lists, but it was a bit of a hassle to setup.

Expecting awesome to mean curated manually is unrealistic now. But there are plenty of opportunities to make an awesome list compelling via automation.

One of many examples is WebMCP-support. How often did you find a truly awesome, perfectly maintained list and felt overwhelmed? Then you bookmark it and get a coffee. A list with proper agent-support will allow me to cut through the non-noise. Finally the list will be actually helping me instead of being a bookmark.

There are more examples like this. Awesome Lists have a golden future as one of the knowledge resources that are not gatekept.

I remember the first ones were genuinely cool and interesting, and you could tell someone made them because they actually liked the tools. But it quickly turned into dumping in whatever was popular in a given community, often tools the author hadn't tried even once. When a list has 100+ links, do you really think the author checked them one by one?

A list of a sensible size looks different, e.g. this one: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

The related repositories are more relevant to what the user is looking at. Also, the semantic search functionality helps you to explore according to meaning rather than just keyword matching.

https://github.com/testy-cool/repoaura https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/repoaura/ephpinbdbo...

Also I had been wanting to curate an awesome list as well, and made myself an annotation dashboard. For example I wanted one to curate Claude Code Mods.

It's a pretty simple idea you can expand on https://imgur.com/a/XjRCbL2 I have not had enough mental space to curate them though. I wouldn't let an AI handle the curation, because I notice the curated content I like has effort put into the curation part.

Rather than distract myself picking through awesome lists to solve minor problems, fill minor gaps, AI just implements it as part of the task

Which is great cause using the web is a context switch I don't want.

It's all dynamic function generators all the way down. Anything else is fundamentally bike shedding syntax and semantics of a spoon that doesn't exist.

Anything else is making Mona Lisa out of code, objectifying it with formal OOP dogma.

- https://github.com/dannyfritz/awesome-ray-tracing

0: https://github.com/herrherrmann/awesome-multiplayer-games