agent-vitals

A daily census of the AI agent tooling ecosystem on GitHub — MCP servers, agent frameworks, skills and the tools around them. Not a list of what exists, but a measurement of what is still alive.

Every awesome-list tells you what was published. None of them tell you what has been touched since. This repository answers three questions every day, from public GitHub metadata, and keeps the answers as a time series:

1. How much of the ecosystem is still maintained?

2. How much of it carries a licence you could actually use at work?

3. What appeared, and what went quiet, since yesterday?

2026-09-23

• 39,963 repositories across 13 topic queries in 2 tiers: mcp (17,728, 2+ stars), agents (22,235, 10+ stars).

• 46.9% pushed in the last 30 days.

• 6,664 (16.7%) have no licence file at all, which leaves them under exclusive copyright by default: no permission to use, copy or modify them, whatever the README suggests. A further 3,113 (7.8%) carry a licence GitHub cannot map to a standard identifier — those are licensed, just not in a way a procurement review waves through.

• Only 8,184 of these repositories are even a year old. Among those, 29.1% have not been pushed since — the headline 6.0% across the whole index is an artefact of how young this ecosystem is.

• Churn since the previous run: +253 new, -40 gone.

Maintenance status

Licences

no licence file and licence GitHub cannot identify are different things and are counted separately. The second group has a LICENSE file; GitHub simply cannot match it to a standard identifier.

Most-starred, still maintained

Ranked by stars, restricted to repositories pushed within the last 30 days.

Popular but unmaintained

Over 50 stars, no push in more than a year. These are the entries that stay on curated lists long after anyone stopped answering issues.

Quiet, permissive, still asked about

No push in over a year, or archived, yet 200 or more stars, a permissive licence and five or more open issues. People still arrive; nobody answers. Each is forkable as it stands. A date, a star count and a licence field, never a verdict on the work.

Busy, permissive, with open work

Pushed in the last 30 days, 1,000 or more stars, a permissive licence and thirty or more open issues: maintained, wanted, and short of hands. Ranked by open issues.

Trend

Related MCP server: Repo Radar MCP

Ask it from an agent

The census is an MCP server too, standard library only, four tools: lookup a repository's status and licence, search by words with status and licence filters, summary of the latest run, and the two candidates lists.

git clone https://github.com/Keremozdemirra/agent-vitals && cd agent-vitals
claude mcp add agent-vitals -- python3 "$PWD/mcp_server.py"

AGENT_VITALS_REMOTE=1 reads the published index instead of the checkout, so the clone can stay old. Nothing is written or executed; it answers from data/servers.json.

Use the data

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Keremozdemirra/agent-vitals/main/data/servers.csv -o servers.csv

Everything is committed, so git log data/history.csv is the changelog of the ecosystem itself.

Method

• Source: the GitHub REST search API, public repository metadata only. Nothing is cloned, downloaded or executed.

• Tiers and their star floors:

  • mcp — 2+ stars: topic:mcp-server, topic:model-context-protocol

  • agents — 10+ stars: topic:mcp, topic:claude-code, topic:ai-agents, topic:ai-agent, topic:agent-skills, topic:agentic-ai, topic:claude-skills, topic:autonomous-agents, topic:llm-agents, topic:agent-framework, topic:llm-tools The MCP topics name one specific thing, so two stars is enough. The broad agent topics are also attached to every tutorial and course repository in the field; ten stars is where they start describing tools rather than exercises.

• Each query is sliced by star count until every slice fits under GitHub's 1000-result ceiling, so this is a census rather than a top-1000 sample.

• status is derived from pushed_at alone. It measures whether a repository is being touched, not whether it is good. A finished, correct tool can sit at abandoned and still work.

• license_state is the field that matters. spdx means GitHub matched a standard licence; non-standard means a LICENSE file exists that GitHub reports as NOASSERTION (n8n's Sustainable Use License, for one); none means no licence file was detected at all. Only the last of those means "you have no permission to use this", and conflating the two would misrepresent projects that did license their work.

• A repository leaves the index when it is deleted, renamed, drops below the star floor, or has its topic removed. left_the_index does not mean deleted, and this index cannot tell those cases apart.

• Repository descriptions are third-party text. They are stripped of control characters, truncated, and escaped at render time.

What this is not

• Not a security audit. Nothing here says a repository is safe or unsafe. The fields are dates, counts and licence identifiers — facts from the API, not judgements about anyone's code.

• Not a quality ranking. Stars measure attention, not merit.

• Not a recommendation. Check anything you install yourself.

What is in here, and whose it is

Nothing in this repository is anyone else's work. No repository is cloned, downloaded, or copied. Two kinds of thing are published:

1. Facts from the GitHub API — name, URL, star and fork counts, creation and last-push dates, detected licence identifier, archived flag. Facts about public repositories, not expression, and each one links to its source.

2. The repository's own one-line description, as its author wrote it, truncated and shown next to a link to the original. This is the only third-party text here, and it is used the way every package registry and search index uses it.

Everything else — the collector, the renderer, this text, the analysis — was written for this repository.

Licence

• Code (collect.py, render.py, the workflow): MIT.

• The compilation — the selection, structure and derived fields in data/: CC0 1.0. Take it, chart it, fork it, no attribution required.

• The description field: belongs to whoever wrote it, and is reproduced here as a short factual descriptor alongside a link to its source. It is not covered by the CC0 grant above, and this index makes no claim over it.

• The indexed repositories themselves: their authors', under their own licences — which is precisely what this index measures.

If you own a repository listed here and want its description dropped from the index, open an issue and it will be removed from the next run.

Regenerated automatically. Last run: 2026-09-23T09:49:03+00:00 · status: complete.