Why did I build Aegis Pulse? As always, it started with a simple thought that keeps getting me time and time again: "I should automate this."
So, I announced Aegis Stack publicly on Reddit on December 3rd. From that very moment, I became great friends with the Unique Clones / Total Clones & Unique Visitors / Total Views charts in GitHub's analytics page. Due to the nature of aegis-stack, every stack that is spun up will clone the actual repo itself (outside of caching situations, which may vary from user to user). I didn't realize it at the time, but those clone numbers, especially the Unique Clones, would become the most important metric for me to track usage.
There's this funny thing that happens when you release an OSS tool. You expect people to say something, maybe tell others, ask questions... just... something... Instead, the person looks at the tool, sees if it makes their life easier, and puts it in their bag of other tools. I know this, because this is me! I never thought about it until I'm on the other side. I had to mentally go through all the tools I had used over the years, and realized I never cared about anything other than the tool itself. And if it didn't work, I would try to make it work, and if not, just move on. Time is money, and all of that.
All of that is to say, clones are something I have been tracking since day one.
Now... GitHub has a 14-day rolling window period in which they have daily values, and the 14-day rolling totals. And when I say 14 days, I mean it. That's all you get, and it's on you to keep track of everything outside of that. Fair enough.
Thus began the daily ritual of going and grabbing the latest numbers from the previous day, and pasting the data into 3 separate AI chats: ChatGPT, Claude Opus, and Google Gemini. I figured that since I was already storing all of this data, I might as well see what type of insights I could get from these chats (which were preloaded with enough context to know what's going on). It was a great tool for me, and helped shape how I would determine release cadence, the things to release in order, etc.
The biggest issue was what everyone reaches at some point... Once the context reached a certain size, none of the chats could keep everything straight, and I lost even more time porting chats to new chats to keep the whole show running.
I finally gave in and said "I should automate this."
Till tomorrow...
This was originally published on the Aegis Pulse blog. Pulse is free, no signup, and you can look up any package to see its real human-vs-bot download split at https://pulse.aegis-stack.io/search.
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