Okay, so hear me out… I was messing around with the GitHub API the other day, trying to understand how people discover new projects. You know how it is, you find a repo you love, star it, and then you might go down a rabbit hole looking for similar stuff. But what if you could see what else those people are starring?
That’s exactly what I wondered. So, I whipped up a little tool to do just that. And yeah, I used ChatGPT to help me build it. Pretty wild, right? It’s a cool way to see the interconnectedness of the open-source world and honestly, a neat experiment in using AI for practical coding tasks.
Here’s the basic idea: You give it a GitHub repository. It then looks up all the users who have starred that repo. From that list of users, it pulls out all the other repositories they’ve starred. Then, it counts which of those other repos are most frequently starred by this group. Essentially, it’s finding the common ground among people who like a specific project.
Why is this cool? Well, imagine you’re really into a particular JavaScript framework. This tool could show you other JavaScript tools, libraries, or even backend technologies that developers using that framework also tend to like. It’s like a recommendation engine, but driven purely by the collective taste of developers.
I’m still playing around with the best way to present the data, but the initial results are pretty fascinating. It definitely highlights trends I hadn’t considered. For example, a lot of people starring a popular data science library also seemed to be starring various machine learning visualization tools. Makes sense, but seeing it laid out like that is different.
This project isn’t just about finding new code; it’s also about exploring how AI can assist in development. Prompting ChatGPT to generate specific API call structures or to help debug a tricky function was surprisingly effective. It’s like having a pair programmer who’s available 24/7 and knows a ton of stuff, though you still need to guide it carefully.
It’s a reminder that as we explore new technologies, understanding how we use them and how they connect is key. This little tool is my way of digging into that, and I’m excited to see where I can take it next. Plus, it’s a great way to discover awesome projects I might have otherwise missed.
What do you guys think? Have you ever wondered about this? Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas for improving the tool or what repos you’d like to see analyzed!