What 14 Years of a Code-Download Site Taught Us About Demand in the AI Era

1Key Takeaways

• I run Zuidaima (“Most Code”), a Chinese source-code sharing site that launched in 2012.
• At its peak it felt like a small economy: upload code, earn points, spend points to download, cash out points.
• About 537k registered users , nearly 10k shared projects , and millions of behavioral events later, search traffic dried up—and so did uploads.
• Recently I finally sat down with the production data (registrations, views, downloads, completed payments through mid‑2026) to answer a question I’d been….