"Local AI is dead" - 22 local-first repos say otherwise

The claim: "Local AI is dead" it shows that people are still discovering and paying attention to local-first projects.

We have covered 22 Local-first repositories since 2026-03-10. 16 of them have a star count recorded from the day we covered them. Between those days and 2026-09-13 they gained +39,417 stars (+9.4%).

A star count measures attention, not health, adoption or revenue. It can answer whether people are still arriving; it cannot answer whether the software is good or whether anyone ships it.

So the idea that “Local AI is dead” is too strong. But stars only show interest on GitHub—they don’t tell us how many people actually use these projects, how good they are, or whether they are making money.

What the numbers show

The 16 repositories with a star baseline held 419,336 stars between them on the day each was covered. Today they hold 458,753, a change of +39,417 (+9.4%).

15 gained stars, 1 finished level.

6 of the 22 repositories have no star count recorded from the day they were covered, so no change can be stated for them. They are listed below without a delta. We do not estimate figures we did not capture.

Pulling away

• AprilNEA/OpenLogi covered 2026-08-08, 7,901 to 20,639 stars (+12,738, +161.2%)
• onyx-dot-app/onyx covered 2026-06-22, 24,802 to 32,026 stars (+7,224, +29.1%)
• usememos/memos covered 2026-05-12, 57,164 to 62,913 stars (+5,749, +10.1%)
• caddyserver/caddy covered 2026-06-21, 70,312 to 75,652 stars (+5,340, +7.6%)
• appwrite/appwrite covered 2026-05-12, 54,917 to 57,349 stars (+2,432, +4.4%)

They solve a clear problem and make a useful idea easy for people to understand and try. They also fit into things developers already care about, which helps them spread through the community.

Barely moved

6 of the 12 repositories we covered more than 30 days ago gained less than 5% since. Anything covered more recently is left out of this comparison, having had little time to move.

• appsmithorg/appsmith covered 2026-07-07, 39,192 to 40,860 stars (+1,668, +4.3%)
• StevenBlack/hosts covered 2026-07-10, 30,132 to 31,040 stars (+908, +3.0%)
• Hmbown/CodeWhale covered 2026-08-03, 40,245 to 40,948 stars (+703, +1.7%)
• QuivrHQ/quivr covered 2026-07-25, 39,232 to 39,507 stars (+275, +0.7%)
• dokku/dokku covered 2026-06-13, 31,934 to 32,128 stars (+194, +0.6%)

How these numbers were collected

"Stars then" is the count recorded by our pipeline on the day the repository was reviewed. "Stars now" is the count from the GitHub API on 2026-09-13. Both are stored per repository in our star history dataset. We did not run or test any of these projects; every figure is a count, not an assessment.

Each repository links to its own page on https://githubtrends.app, which carries the video review and the full coverage record.

Every repository we have covered under this topic is listed on the Local-first page.