The timing of the project was pretty good and things were just aligned: AI video is booming, capcut is popular but changed pricing, there’s regulatory risk, and the dev is building publicly.
Like when you have nothing to show off, after the first day, already gaining thousands of stars per day. And the last 5 days, with 2 or more thousands per day consistently, linearly...
And let's say that we believe in the stars, just look at the number of forks, why so many persons would fork the project so fast, to still do nothing, no contribution or personal commits. Accounts of new users, or almost empty, or shaddy like the following one:
https://github.com/1234567891o12?tab=repositories
The overlap between CapCut enthusiasts and GitHub users is not that big. Non-technical TikTok/Instagram influencers aren’t flocking to GitHub to star the project, not to mention it’s useless to them at this stage. This kind of project, if very successful, may amass 10k to 20k organic stars in a few years. (I say this as someone who has both served on the maintainer team of a huge, household-name-in-tech kind of project with ~50k stars, and had personal projects in the 1-10k star range.)
Compare this to openai/whisper, which was a huge release at the time by the hottest AI unicorn (1.7k points on HN for the release), immediately useful and with much better user alignment: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi... The star growth was no comparison to this one person early stage project.
So I agree with others, there’s basically no chance this is organic.
To add another point of comparison, at the moment this is almost matching the velocity of DeepSeek R1 from Jan 20 to Jan 29, which, if you recall, was such a hot topic it triggered a huge market crash: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi.... Unbelievable.
