If the Top 10 trending GitHub repositories at the end of 2025’s first calendar week are any indication, AI and autonomous agents remain hotbeds of activity – reverse engineering and ripping music are also hot.
There are a few potentially artificially inflated projects in the mix – notable given recent findings that GitHub stars are all far from real.
As we close out the first week of 2025, here’s a quick look at the hottest repositories, by most new stars. (GitHub should ideally have other easy alternative filters for “trending…” by commits, etc. perhaps? )
1) ElizaOS lets users spin up social media personas or AI agents “with consistent personalities” across Discord, Twitter, and Telegram that can also be used, in theory, as customer support assistants. These have full support for voice, text, and media interactions and can be powered by a wide range of large language models. The framework grew out of “ai16z”, a crypto-centric, AI-powered fund/memecoin/community created by a pseudonymous developer named Shaw. The deeper you dig the odder it gets, but the repository is highly active and you can check it out here.
2) KAG, born at China’s Ant Group, brings together knowledge graphs (ways of organising, linking, and sharing data) and LLMs in a way that its developers say helps overcome “the deficiencies of RDF/OWL [semantic model standards] and LPG in knowledge management”. It is, they say, used to build logical reasoning and factual Q&A solutions for professional domain knowledge bases. It can effectively overcome the shortcomings of the traditional RAG vector similarity calculation model.” Details here.
3) Cobalt is pretty simple on the surface. It’s a way to rip content from Daily Motion, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube and several other platforms – as audio or video. The repository is available here.
See also: Fidelity reveals "chaos buffet": Says 7,700 apps on public cloud
4) Shortest is an AI-powered testing framework that lets developers write end-to-end tests in plain English. It calls the Anthropic Claude API, is built on Playwright and GitHub integration with 2FA support is available. The vast majority of commits have been from Mohammed Rad. Repo.
5) Siyuan says it’s a “privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software, written in typescript and golang.” Quite what that means and why you’d want to use it was beyond our first glance but it appears at its heart to have a structured markdown engine built for Chinese language running. Check the repo and explain?
6) Monolith, from China’s ByteDance, is a deep learning framework for large scale recommendation modeling built on TensorFlow. It hasn’t had any recent commits and only three committers but this week has seen a flurry of “stars” (2,521 stars this week), make of that what you will, but news has widely circulated that GitHub stars are not all real. Repo.
7) Cline is an autonomous coding agent that runs in your IDE. It can create/edit files, execute commands, use the browser, and more. Users can call OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure, GCP Vertex, or use a local model through LM Studio/Ollama. Repo.
8) Fishshell is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that can be installed under the WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux, on MacOS or a bunch of flavours of Linux. Fish has been about since 2017. Right now… apparently it’s very popular though. The GitHub repository is here.
9) ImHex is a “A Hex Editor for reverse engineers, programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.” It’s free, open-source and has a bunch of good features normally only available in expensive proprietary software. Like it? Buy WeWolv a coffee. Repo.
10) PromptWizard is “a discrete prompt optimization framework that employs a self-evolving mechanism where the LLM generates, critiques, and refines its own prompts and examples, continuously improving through iterative feedback and synthesis”. Demos. The repository is here.
