I maintain a catalogue of open-source AI projects — 2,155 of them, across 17 categories — and the question I get asked most is not "which tool should I use?" It's "how do I know this project won't be abandoned six months after I build on it?"

Stars won't tell you. A repository with 40,000 stars can sit untouched for two years. What follows is the five-minute check I actually run, using nothing but the GitHub website. No API keys, no command line.

1. The last commit date — but read it properly

Open the repo. Right there on the file list, next to the top file, is the last commit's timestamp. That is your first signal, and it's a blunt one: a last commit from over a year ago is close to a verdict on its own.

But a commit from this week means almost nothing by itself. It could be a typo fix, a README tweak, or a bot bumping a dependency. So the date is a filter, not a pass mark. If it's old, stop here. If it's recent, keep going.

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