I've seen lots of metrics to decide if an open source project is alive: age of bugs, number of pull requests open, number of commits in a time period.
When choosing libraries, I've realised I only look at the last commit time. That's sufficient activity IME.
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It's weird that GitHub shows time since the last commit, but not time since the first commit. It's a nice way of seeing how mature a project is.
I have a bunch of open tasks on my GH repos, so I tried asking ChatGPT and Claude to write a card-based web UI that showed some random open issues.
ChatGPT gave me something that worked, but the Claude mock-ups look better (and render inline!).
I've dabbled with 'conventional commits' for a personal project but I found they slowed me down.
It's not always easy to categorise a commit as a fix, a chore etc. Sometimes refactorings also fix bugs.
Do you use them? I can imagine a large, mature project benefitting more.