The State of Open Source 2025 - Key Takeaways
GitHub recently published this year's Octoverse, the state of the open-source ecosystem.
Below are my key takeaways:
AI doesn’t replace developers—it brings more people into the ecosystem. A new developer joined GitHub every second in 2025. Top 5 developer populations: 1. United States, 2. India, 3. China, 4. Brazil, 5. United Kingdom.
Open source remains the foundation. Fastest-growing OSS projects by contributors include @Zen Browser, @VS Code, and AI-focused @Continue.
TypeScript is now the most used language on GitHub, overtook both Python and JavaScript. The AI effect? 80% of new repositories used just six languages: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C++, and C#.
Gen AI is now standard in development. 1.1M public repositories now use an LLM SDK.
Agents are here. Coding agents created 1M+ pull requests (PR) in the last 6 months, and it's just getting started.
See full report here - Any results that struck you?
Replies
Humans in the Loop
@anishsharma oh good point! the problem might lie in the definition of a developer. what is a developer from your pov? at what point can someone call themselves a developer?
@anishsharma @fmerian If you are triangulating LLMs in an IDE to produce your product, you are not a developer or coder, you are an AI architect. An orchestrator. Which is deadly if used right.
Humans in the Loop
@wfo808 I like this definition very much
Great insights. How Typescript is able to takeover python is beyond me.
Humans in the Loop
Right!? To add more details, extracted from the report (source):
TypeScript grew by over 1M contributors in 2025 (+66% YoY), driven by frameworks that scaffold projects in TypeScript by default and by AI-assisted development that benefits from stricter type systems.
Python remains dominant in AI and data science with 2.6M contributors (+48% YoY).
JavaScript is still massive (2.15M contributors), but its growth slowed as developers shifted toward TypeScript.
Swytchcode
Absolutely correct. I completely agree with you
Quoting the report: "If AI-assisted tools continue to lower the barrier to entry, we could see programming literacy expand dramatically."
I am not fully convinced that "literacy" is the right term to use here. Maybe "access" would be more correct. Literacy, at least for me, implies some level of mastery and understanding.
Certainly more people than ever before will be able to use computation to solve their problems, but I am really worried about how junior engineers will be able to "walk the path" and reach mastery in this new world.
The problem, as a matter of fact, applies to all of education. It just so happens that software developers have been affected first. We will all need to reckon with this evolution over the next, very few, years.