Ecosystem Report: June 2026 — Hermes Crosses 200K

Key Takeaways

• +125,831 stars across 175 tracked repos (+8.3% in 29 days) — strong, though below May's +12.4%
• Hermes Agent crossed 200K on 2026-06-23, landing squarely in the "mid-to-late June" window we predicted last month
• Skill hubs took 4 of the top 6 mover slots — academic-research-skills (+50%), nature-skills (+76%), humanizer (+23%), awesome-ai-research-writing (+14%)
• Google DeepMind entered the directory with science-skills, added at 2,081 stars
• earendil-works/pi joined at 65,695 stars — the largest single addition we have ever made
• yao-meta-skill grew +321% (384 → 1,615), the month's steepest climb

The Numbers

Counts here are repositories present in the daily snapshot, deduplicated across the project index and the skill-hub list. A handful of repos appear in both.

Top Movers (5/28 → 6/26)

By absolute stars added:

By percentage (start ≥ 100 stars):

Hermes at 200K: The Prediction That Landed

Last month we wrote: "We expect Hermes to cross 200K in June if current pace holds." It crossed on 2026-06-23.

The deceleration we kept predicting finally showed up — just not enough to matter. Hermes added +45K in May and +32K in June, a 28% drop in monthly velocity while still out-growing every other repo in the directory by a factor of two. At 203K it now holds roughly 12% of the ecosystem's total stars.

The honest read: we have now called Hermes' deceleration three months running and been directionally right only once. Growth rates on a repo this size are dominated by whatever the wider Claude community does next, which we do not have visibility into.

Skill Hubs Own the Leaderboard

Four of June's top six absolute movers were skill hubs rather than agent projects. That is not a one-month artifact — it is the third consecutive month the pattern has strengthened.

• Imbad0202/academic-research-skills: +11,453 (+50%), now 34.6K
• Yuan1z0825/nature-skills: +10,109 (+76%), now 23.4K
• blader/humanizer: +4,888 (+23%)
• Leey21/awesome-ai-research-writing: +3,730 (+14%)

The common thread remains academic writing. A researcher adopting these hubs is not looking for an autonomous scientist — they want the paper-writing bottleneck removed while keeping their own hands on the science. Agent frameworks promise to replace the researcher; skill hubs promise to speed one up. June's numbers say the second pitch is winning.

New Arrivals

Five repositories entered the directory in June:

earendil-works/pi (65,695⭐ at addition) — the largest single addition in the directory's history. A general agent runtime rather than a science-specific tool, added because a growing share of science agents are being built on it.

google-deepmind/science-skills (2,081⭐) — DeepMind's own entry into the skill-hub category. Worth watching closely: an official DeepMind hub competing with community hubs like nature-skills changes the category's dynamics.

microsoft/SkillOpt (9,357⭐) — skill optimization tooling from Microsoft. Together with the DeepMind entry, June was the month big labs started shipping into the skills layer rather than only the model layer.

zou-group/textgrad (3,628⭐) — added as stable; the repo is paper-anchored and release-driven rather than continuously developed.

AMAP-ML/SkillClaw (2,024⭐) — skill framework from AMAP's ML group.

What Went Quiet

OpenAGS was removed from GitHub on 2026-06-01 and now has an entry in the graveyard. It had been May's highest-percentage gainer (+373%, 60 → 284 stars). The openags org stayed active with seven other repos, so this reads as consolidation rather than abandonment — but the code and its issue history are gone.

anthropics/skills grew +9% against an ecosystem average of +8.3%. After May, when it grew slower than the ecosystem for the first time, June brought it back to roughly par. Saturation at 155K looks more likely than decline.

What to Watch in July

1. Does the DeepMind hub take share from community hubs? science-skills entered at 2K against nature-skills' 23K
2. academic-research-skills crossing 50K — 34.6K and still compounding at +50%/month
3. Hermes at 230K — the pace implies late July, but see our track record above
4. The March–April cohort — a large group of claw-named projects last shipped in March and April. If they stay quiet through July, that is a structural story rather than a seasonal one
5. Whether big-lab entries keep coming — Microsoft and DeepMind both shipped into skills in June

Methodology

• Star counts: GitHub stars snapshotted daily into docs/stars-history.csv
• Growth window: 2026-05-28 → 2026-06-26 (29 days)
• Comparison basis: the 175 repositories present in both snapshots. Repos added mid-window are listed under New Arrivals and excluded from growth totals, so the +8.3% reflects organic growth rather than curation activity
• Top-mover filters: percentage rankings require start ≥ 100 stars
• stable status: human-curated for paper-anchored and release-driven projects, which are excluded from dormancy reporting
• Publication note: this report was compiled on 2026-07-26 from archived daily snapshots. The data window is unaffected — every figure comes from the 5/28 and 6/26 snapshots recorded at the time

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Previous report: Ecosystem Report: May 2026 — Skill Hubs Take Over — 146 projects, +2 new, Hermes +45K, the skill-hub explosion.

Last updated: 2026-07-26.