LibreAI is a catalogue of 2,135 open-source AI projects on GitHub, across 17 categories, with a full install guide for 1,138 of them and shorter verified pages for 997 more. There is no database behind it. No CMS, no admin panel, no server-side code at all — just static HTML, rebuilt on a schedule. Here's how the catalogue stays honest without a backend.
The weekly pass
Every week, 10–15 new projects are researched and added. Each candidate is verified live against the GitHub API before it ships: stars, forks, licence, and recent activity. A project with real momentum and an active community gets in; a dead repo, a renamed repo, or a licence that doesn't match its README doesn't. The check happens before listing, not after someone complains.
That cadence matters more than it sounds. Open-source projects move: maintainers rename repos, archive them, change licences, or go quiet for a year. A catalogue that verified everything once, at launch, would be quietly wrong within months. The weekly pass is the whole quality system — small, boring, and non-negotiable.
Hidden gems, on purpose
997 of the 2,135 projects are "hidden gems": strong, verified projects that nobody has covered yet, on shorter pages for now. They get expanded into full guides over time. The split is deliberate — a short honest page for a good project beats no page at all, and it beats a padded page that pretends to know more than it does.
Why static
No database means no server to babysit, no login system to secure, and pages that load fast anywhere in the world. The trade-off is that every change is a rebuild instead of an edit: fix a guide, regenerate the site, deploy. For a catalogue that changes weekly rather than hourly, that's a good trade. The other trade-off is search — the category pages are searchable, but there's no live query engine; the index is generated, not computed per request.
What breaks
Three things, in practice. First, upstream drift: a project's star count doubles, or its maintainer archives it, and the guide goes stale between passes — the weekly verification catches it, but only weekly. Second, category creep: a project that fits two categories has to live in one, and the choice is a judgement call every time. Third, the long tail: the deeper you go into the catalogue, the thinner the signal — a 400-star project with a careful README can matter more than a 40,000-star one coasting on a launch post. Stars sort; they don't judge.
The honest bit
A catalogue like this is only as good as its last verification pass. That's not a flaw in the design — it's the design. The weekly rhythm exists because "verified once" is a promise no static site can keep, and "verified weekly" is one it can.
The catalogue itself is at https://libreaihub.com — 2,135 projects, 17 categories, every one of them free and open source.
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