Project Health Check: Bus Factor and Commit Activity Across Claw/Assistant Repos

A Reddit user compiled a comparison of development status for various claw/assistant projects by analyzing commit history from their GitHub repos. The analysis used commit count as the sole metric and calculated a 'bus factor' defined as the minimum number of contributors whose combined commits account for more than half of the project's history. Data was gathered via a vibecoded script (instructions to Claude). The post includes two tables: active projects and dead projects (total collapse in April).

Key Findings

• picoclaw has the highest bus factor (15) and highest top author contribution at only 7.6%, indicating a healthy distribution. February through April commits: 567, 662, 323.
• QwenPaw (bus factor 6, top author 12.2%) saw a jump from 51 commits in Feb to 618 in Mar and 382 in Apr.
• zeroclaw (bus factor 4, top author 26.5%) had 1228 commits in Feb, 1162 in Mar, then dropped to 317 in Apr.
• nanobot (bus factor 3, top author 41.2%) stayed steady: 552, 484, 609.
• openclaw has bus factor 1 (top author 58.8%) but high activity: 6988 Feb, 8704 Mar, 14586 Apr.
• hermes-agent (bus factor 1, top author 51.7%) also growing: 425, 1955, 3644.
• angel-claw and troublemaker have 100% of commits from a single author.
• Several projects appear dead with near-zero commits in April: hermitclaw (0 commits in Mar and Apr), mimiclaw (0 in Apr), droidclaw (0 in Apr), tinyclaw (0 in Apr), and others.

Dead Projects (April Collapse)

Projects listed as dead with total collapse in April include: hermitclaw, mimiclaw, pickle-bot, safeclaw, lettabot, Clawlet, subzeroclaw, atombot, autobot, babyclaw, droidclaw, picobot, shrew, supaclaw, tinyclaw, zclaw. Most show zero or single-digit commits in April after moderate activity in Feb/Mar.

Limitations

The author notes that commit count is the only metric; a single large 'proper' commit has less weight than multiple typo-fix commits. The bus factor definition is non-standard but allows quick assessment of single-author dependency. The data is intended for discussion, not academic rigor.