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in january 2025 nate invited me to contribute to contribute to @bomb.sh back then clack was doing around 2 million weekly downloads. this week it crossed 19.3 million. almost 20 million. i keep thinking about why.

part of it is the obvious stuff. clack makes cli prompts feel good. frameworks and scaffolding tools adopted it. the community kept it healthy. but there’s a bigger shift underneath.

software is becoming agentic, and agentic software lives in the terminal. every ai coding agent, every scaffolding flow, every automated workflow runs through cli tooling.

the terminal stopped being a niche developer surface and became the primary interface where humans and agents meet. libraries like clack are quietly load-bearing for that entire layer.

none of this happens without open source. people reviewing prs on weekends. contributors fixing spinners and shipping accessibility work because it matters, not because anyone paid them to.

clack wouldn’t be where it is without the people i work with. thank you @natemoo.re for the inv and trusting me to help maintain the project.

and thank you @43081j.com , who i’ve worked with hand in hand this whole time. his work on release cadence, bug fixes, and shipping features has been crucial to getting clack here.