A free piece of software from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, is now one of the fastest-growing projects GitHub has ever hosted: published on 13 August, past 225,000 stars and nearly 27,000 forks by mid-September. It is not a model. It is an agent harness, the software that decides what an AI model is allowed to touch, and its architecture is the reason for the growth: every layer of it is a swappable plugin.

Its own safety notice says it has not been audited and must not be treated as production-ready, and its own engineers write that the default credential store cannot keep a secret from the AI it serves.

In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:

• The number. 225,223 stars and 26,799 forks in 33 days, under an MIT license, with a new release the same week. The projects at the top of GitHub's all-time list t ...