daniel.haxx.se

The curl project reached 20,000 issues on GitHub, marking significant growth in community engagement. After migrating from Sourceforge in 2015, the project has seen issue submission rates increase from 3.7 per day (2015-2022) to 9 per day (2022-2025). The project maintains efficiency by closing half of all issues within 6 hours and keeping open issues low despite rising submission frequency.

20,000 issues on GitHub

but the real question is… how does this compare to corporate throwing bugs at devs? Is the same level? Is it beeter? Or is it worse?

This is definitely AI powered issues. The sharp increase starting in 2024 is no coincidence.

Curl has this many bugs?!?
I use it everyday, all good 🤔

Well, to be honest, the 20k bugs are spread over 16 years on GitHub, so that’s more like 1,250 a year. It’s a lot, but it’s not out of hand, and currently there are only 10 open issues, so I really don’t see a problem.
For a tool that is so widely used and has existed for over 30 years (first release in 1996), you can expect that many issues to be raised. And as mentioned in the article, 50% are closed within 6 hours, so they are not major issues, just small fixes or reports that get resolved quickly.
What I’m trying to say is that the takeaway from this article should not be that the curl developers are incompetent or that curl is a hot pile of legacy, buggy code. Instead, it’s impressive that the tool has built such a community that consistently reports bugs and helps fix them.