A topic is a subject, not a query. “Video generation” is one subject expressed three ways — topic:video-generation on GitHub, text-to-video on Hugging Face, and the words on Hacker News. Sources with nothing to say about a subject simply leave their field out.
GitHub's budget is requests, not results. Unauthenticated search allows 30 a minute and one is reserved for the broad query, so 29 topics can carry a GitHub search — depth inside each is free, breadth is not. A token is set, so the ceiling is 30 and there are 7 spare. Hugging Face and Hacker News are unmetered at our volume, so topics that only use those cost nothing.
The agent runtime layer — the closest thing to what Nodes is.
topic:ai-agents · stars>60 · recenthn:“AI agent”topic:llm · stars>20 · younghn:“LLM tool calling”How agents reach tools. Low star floor: the ecosystem is young.
topic:mcp · stars>25 · recenthn:“MCP server”topic:image-generation · stars>40 · recenthf:text-to-imagehn:“image generation”topic:video-generation · stars>20 · recenthf:text-to-videohn:“video generation”Measured 2026-09-08: 1432 repos.
topic:self-hosted · stars>200 · recenthn:“self-hosted”topic:3d · stars>60 · recenthf:text-to-3dhn:“3D generation”topic:image-to-video · stars>15 · recenthf:image-to-videoWithout this the Roblox category only ever matches through adjacent tags.
topic:roblox · stars>8 · recenthn:“Roblox”Measured 2026-09-08: topic:kubernetes 1453. High floor or it returns tutorials.
topic:kubernetes · stars>200 · recenthn:“kubernetes”Measured 2026-09-08: 1832 repos. Separate from kubernetes: the overlap is smaller than it looks.
topic:docker · stars>200 · recenthn:“docker”topic:game-development · stars>40 · recenthn:“game development AI”Measured 2026-09-08: 1302 repos.
topic:security · stars>200 · recenthn:“security vulnerability”Measured 2026-09-08: 771 repos.
topic:database · stars>150 · recenthn:“database engine”Measured 2026-09-08: 335 repos, so a low floor. topic:monitoring (509) mostly overlaps.
topic:observability · stars>80 · recenthn:“observability”Measured 2026-09-08: 554 repos pushed in the last three weeks above 50 stars.
topic:devops · stars>100 · recenthn:“devops”topic:agentic-workflow · stars>60 · recenthn:“agentic workflow”Young repos only — this is what actually fills the Emerging feed.
topic:diffusion-models · stars>10 · younghn:“diffusion model”topic:image-editing · stars>40 · recenthf:image-to-imagetopic:no-code · stars>25 · recenthn:“automation workflow”Measured 2026-09-08: topic:terraform 361. topic:serverless (257) is the next candidate.
topic:terraform · stars>80 · recenthn:“terraform”Named directly — the closest public analogue of the node graph we ship.
topic:n8n · stars>15 · recenthn:“n8n”A topic with no source is a label with nothing behind it. Fill in at least one.
{
"id": "your-topic-id",
"label": "Your topic",
"category": "ai",
"enabled": true
}Paste it into data/topics.json and commit. The next scheduled run picks it up; nothing here writes to the file, because collection happens in CI against the committed version and a control that pretended otherwise would be lying.
A topic returning zero is worth reading twice before deleting: on GitHub it usually means the star floor is above what that corner of the ecosystem has, not that the subject is dead. Lowering minStars is the first thing to try — Roblox sits at 8 for exactly this reason.