The standing record
The scoreboard
Every tool Bellwether tracks, with the numbers named for exactly what they count. No hype score and no usage index: how often developers posted about it, how often that reached the front page, how many times its package was downloaded, and how many job ads asked for it.
- HN stories, 4 wks
- Distinct stories on Hacker News and Lobsters that name the tool, last 28 days.
- Front page, 90 days
- Of those stories in the last 90 days, how many reached 100+ points.
- Downloads a week
- The package's weekly npm or PyPI downloads: last complete week's median, and the change over 12 weeks.
- Job ads, 7 days
- Postings in Adzuna's UK IT feed and on RemoteOK in the last week whose title or description names it.
AI coding tools
| Tool | HN stories, 4 wks | Front page, 90d | Downloads a week | Job ads, 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aider | 1 | 0 | 68.2K -61.3% | 0 |
| Claude Code3 open bets | 224 | 16 | 6.4M -37.6% | 1 |
| Cline | 1 | 0 | — | 0 |
| Cursor | 25 | 7 | — | 1 |
| GitHub Copilot | 24 | 4 | — | 4 |
| JetBrains AI | 1 | 0 | — | 0 |
| OpenAI Codex | 110 | 11 | 13.2M -13.6% | 1 |
| Windsurf | 0 | 0 | — | 0 |
| Zed | 1 | 0 | — | 0 |
AI infrastructure
| Tool | HN stories, 4 wks | Front page, 90d | Downloads a week | Job ads, 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CrewAI | 0 | 0 | 668.6K -76.2% | 0 |
| LangChain | 4 | 0 | 1.7M -37.1% | 2 |
| LlamaIndex | 0 | 0 | 644.3K -62.1% | 1 |
| Model Context Protocol | 214 | 9 | 39.4M -16.8% | 1 |
| n8n | 7 | 0 | 84.8K -12.3% | 1 |
| Ollama | 10 | 2 | — | 0 |
| vLLM | 13 | 4 | 423.2K -64.1% | 0 |
AI models and labs
Backend frameworks
| Tool | HN stories, 4 wks | Front page, 90d | Downloads a week | Job ads, 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Django | 4 | 1 | 11.0M -13.6% | 0 |
| Laravel | 4 | 0 | — | 3 |
| Ruby on Rails | 15 | 3 | — | 0 |
Databases
Frontend
Hosting and infrastructure
| Tool | HN stories, 4 wks | Front page, 90d | Downloads a week | Job ads, 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare2 open bets | 83 | 18 | 18.1M +8.3% | 0 |
| Coolify | 0 | 0 | — | 0 |
| Docker | 29 | 3 | — | 3 |
| Fly.io | 2 | 0 | — | 0 |
| Kubernetes | 42 | 3 | — | 12 |
| Railway | 7 | 2 | — | 0 |
| Render | 0 | 0 | — | 0 |
| Vercel | 15 | 0 | 2.6M -17.5% | 0 |
Mobile
| Tool | HN stories, 4 wks | Front page, 90d | Downloads a week | Job ads, 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expo | 4 | 0 | 7.1M -2.2% | 0 |
| Flutter | 10 | 1 | — | 6 |
| Kotlin Multiplatform | 0 | 0 | — | 0 |
| React Native | 6 | 1 | 9.0M -16.7% | 4 |
| SwiftUI | 4 | 1 | — | 0 |