First screen, captured 8 days ago. Open the video.

Awesome repositories are no longer awesome

What HN thinks

Maintainers drowning in agent-made PRs for six-hour-old repos, while half the thread insists the lists were never awesome anyway.

AI spam is burying maintainers
List maintainers report PR volume multiplying with agent-generated submissions for brand-new, unused repos, making curation an exhausting, asymmetric fight.
Automate the rejection, not curation
Many suggest deterministic checks like repo age, star thresholds or template compliance to auto-close junk, while keeping human judgement for what counts as awesome; others doubt AI judges have the taste for it.
They were never really curated
A large camp says awesome lists became bloated catalogs, star farms and content marketing long before LLMs, much like old web directories.

Consensus: Good human curation is valuable and arguably more needed than ever, but most awesome lists have drifted into uncurated catalogs and AI spam is accelerating that decline.

Recommended in the comments

CRAN Task Views ↗ (service): Cited as a well-maintained curated alternative to awesome lists.
Track Awesome List ↗ (service): A commenter still finds interesting resources through it.
RepoAura ↗ (tool): Helps quickly sift out low-quality repos from lists.
Radicle ↗ (tool): Suggested as a promising decentralized alternative to GitHub.
awesome-selfhosted (other): Praised as a genuinely useful list whose maintainers actively reject slop.
modern-unix ↗ (other): Held up as an example of a list of sensible, curated size.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 8 days ago.

Points: 239
Comments: 116
Best rank: #4
Posted: 2026-11-05 by erikgahner
Category: Open source

awesome-lists github ai-slop pull-requests vibe-coding open-source-maintenance

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