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.
https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&Date
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
https://github.com/kietsyu?tab=overview&from=2025-02-01&to=2...
https://github.com/jakele86?tab=overview&from=2025-03-01&to=...
https://github.com/Lukriss98?tab=overview&from=2024-06-01&to...
Or the following one that is quite fun:
In this one, the only other project is a AI generated SEO optimized recipe blog with all the boilerplate still there.
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.