The Pulse #119: Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?

Also: Apple fires staff over fake charities scam, AI models just keep improving, a middle manager burnout possibly on the horizon, and more.

The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.

Today, we cover:

1. Industry pulse. Fake GitHub stars on the rise, Anthropic to raise at $60B valuation, JP Morgan mandating 5-day RTO while Amazon struggles to find enough space for the same, Devin less productive than on first glance, and more.

2. Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? Fresh data shows that the number of questions asked on StackOverflow are as low as they were back in 2009 – which was when StackOverflow was one years old. The drop suggests that ChatGPT – and LLMs – managed to make StackOverflow’s business model irrelevant in about two years’ time.

3. Apples fires staff over fake charities scam. In order to get around $4,000 per year in additional tax cuts, six Apple employees tried to defraud Apple – and the IRS. They were caught, fired, and now face prosecution. A reminder that getting “clever” with corporate perks can wreck otherwise lucrative careers at Big Tech.

4. AI models just keep improving rapidly. Two months after wondering whether LLMs have hit a plateau, the answer seems to be a definite “no.” Google’s Gemini 2.0 LLM and Veo 2 video model is impressive, OpenAI previewed a capable o3 model, and Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled a frontier model that cost less than $6M to train from scratch.

5. Middle manager burnout incoming? A Forbes article suggests a broader middle manager burnout to come across most professional sectors. This could simply be a consequence of higher interest rates, teams growing less, and more pressure on managers. It’s tougher to be an engineering manager, than it has been during the 2010-2022 period, that’s for sure.

1. Industry pulse

Fake GitHub stars

For years, GitHub stars have been used by a proxy for VC investors to gauge how much traction an open source project has. Projects with high traction were much more likely to attract investment because investors assumed that developers’ interest can eventually be monetized.

So, if an open source project could increase its chance of attracting funding by getting more stars, what do you think happened? According to recent research by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, security platform Socket, and North Carolina State University, it’s exactly what you’d expect: projects are faking their GitHub stars.

The counterfeiting of GitHub stars seems to have exploded ~100x since just last year. Here’s data from the paper:

Source: 4.5 Million Suspected Fake Stars in GitHub

The report finds fake stars being used to promote malware repositories, video game cheats, and crypto bots. Some are likely used for growth hacking to secure investment, while some are deployed for “resume fraud:” making it seem a software engineer’s side project on GitHub is a lot more popular than it actually is!

This research is a reminder that GitHub stars can be easily purchased, and more repos are doing just this. GitHub does its part to make it harder to create and operate accounts to buy/sell stars: it has Trust & Safety and Platform Health groups that battle account spam and account farming and are known to suspend accounts that abuse its terms and conditions. Still, this is a cat-and-mouse game, and the ability to buy stars to boost perceived repo popularity is not going anywhere. The more GitHub cracks down on this, the more expensive purchasing those additional stars will likely become, though.

Update on 12 Jan 2025: updated the last sentence that previously stated that GitHub has no incentive to crack down on purchased stars — based on more details I received on what GitHub is doing to fight against such bad actors.

Anthropic to raise at massive $60B valuation?