GitHub Trending: diagram-design breaks out, plus free tools and games to claim (13 Aug 2026)

GitHub’s daily board on 13 August 2026 has a new leader: cathrynlavery/diagram-design added 2,855 stars in the daily window. Agent tooling still fills most of the top ten, but today’s board also has a useful split between editorial diagrams, local inference, routing infrastructure, and tools for running teams of agents. Below is what to star, what to test carefully, and what to claim before it rotates.

Star counts below are stars gained in the daily window, not lifetime totals. The table is sorted by that daily gain from the GitHub Trending daily snapshot.

What’s moving on GitHub today

Repo	Stars today	Total stars	Language	What it is
cathrynlavery/diagram-design	+2,855 1	11,228 1	HTML	Claude Code, Codex, and Pi skill for editorial diagrams
msitarzewski/agency-agents	+1,873 1	144,697 1	Shell	A large roster of specialist AI-agent personas
stablyai/orca	+1,235 1	44,113 1	TypeScript	Desktop, mobile, and VPS workspace for parallel coding agents
semantica-agi/semantica	+845 1	5,846 1	Python	Graph-native context and provenance for accountable AI systems
paperclipai/paperclip	+571 1	77,819 1	TypeScript	Org charts, tasks, budgets, and governance for agent teams
hugohe3/ppt-master	+476 1	45,864 1	Python	Generates natively editable PowerPoint decks from source material
NVIDIA-NeMo/Switchyard	+421 1	902 1	Rust	Proxy and router that translates traffic between LLM APIs
cactus-compute/needle	+315 1	4,366 1	Python	A 14 MB tool-calling model for small devices
shiyu-coder/Kronos	+266 1	36,981 1	Python	Open model family for financial candlestick sequences
macro-inc/macro	+227 1	2,008 1	Rust	Unified workspace for mail, messages, docs, tasks, agents, and CRM

The practical read is simple: diagram-design is the fresh breakout, while the rest of the board is a continuing bet on agent coordination and smaller, more controllable infrastructure.

The three worth opening first

1. Diagram Design — the new breakout

The repository describes 27 visual types for architecture diagrams, flows, timelines, charts, data models, and related work. Its output is self-contained HTML and SVG, with static output as the default and optional motion for ordered explanations. It can also redraw Mermaid or draw.io material into a chosen format and detail level.2

The useful distinction is that this is an installable skill for Claude Code, Codex, and Pi rather than a separate diagram editor. The README gives marketplace installation commands for Claude Code and Codex, plus a direct Git install for Pi.2 If you regularly ask an agent for an architecture sketch and get the same rounded boxes every time, this is the most obvious test from today’s list.

2. Needle — unusually small local inference

Needle 2 is a 45-million-parameter tool-calling and structured-extraction model packaged as a single 14 MB binary. Its README says a full session uses about 28 MB of RAM, and inference does not need a network connection after the engine is fetched.3

That makes it relevant for phones, wearables, smart-home devices, and robots rather than another cloud-agent demo. The trade-off is capability: the project benchmarks it against other small models, not frontier models. Install it with pip install cactus-needle and treat the confidence score as a gate for when to escalate to a larger model.3

3. Switchyard — useful idea, explicit warning

Switchyard translates between OpenAI Chat, OpenAI Responses, and Anthropic Messages formats, then routes traffic to backends such as vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Ollama, or other OpenAI-compatible endpoints. It also exposes routing strategies and Prometheus metrics for requests, errors, latency, tokens, and routing overhead.4

The README calls the project pre-alpha and says its API and algorithms may change significantly before v1.0. It is a good sandbox for A/B tests or a local proxy experiment; it is not a production gateway yet.4

Other climbs with a clear use case

Agency Agents — a collection of specialist agent files with defined personalities, workflows, deliverables, and success metrics. The project now also describes a native desktop app that installs agents into tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and others.5
Orca — runs coding agents side by side in isolated Git worktrees, with terminal splits, mobile monitoring, GitHub and Linear integration, and SSH worktrees. It supports any CLI agent that runs in a terminal and is released under the MIT license.6
Semantica — adds context graphs, provenance, decision tracing, deterministic reasoning, and graph-backed memory around an existing LLM or agent stack. It installs with pip install semantica; the README also flags version v0.6.5 as a security release covering issues including missing Explorer API authentication, SSRF redirect bypass, and injection risks.7
Paperclip — a Node.js server and React UI for assigning goals to agents, tracking work and costs, setting budgets, and adding approval and governance controls. It is aimed at coordinating many agents toward a business goal, not just opening another coding terminal.8
PPT Master — produces PowerPoint files with native shapes, charts, tables, slide masters, and speaker notes rather than a flat image of a slide. Its workflow runs inside an agent-capable AI tool and generates the deck on the user’s machine.9
Kronos — an open-source foundation-model family for financial K-line sequences, trained on data from more than 45 global exchanges. The README lists open models from 4.1 million to 102.3 million parameters and recommends a 512-step maximum context for the small and base models.10
Macro — combines email, chat, docs, tasks, agents, calls, file storage, pull requests, and CRM in one searchable workspace. Its README says the app is built in SolidJS and Rust.11

Freebies and free developer tools to claim

Claim before the rotation

Beacon Pines and We Were Here Together — GameSpot lists both as the Epic Games Store free pair for 6–13 August 2026. Claim them before the August 13 rotation; the same list names Caravan SandWitch as the next free game for 13–20 August.12
More rotating PC giveaways — GamerPower’s PC board, last updated August 12, lists Targeted – 10 Days with 18 days remaining, Cat Named Mojave with 2 days, and Drop Loot as a Steam playtest key with 1 day. It also marks Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Spider Fox, Beacon Pines, and We Were Here Together as ending today. The page gives relative time remaining rather than exact calendar deadlines, so verify the timer before claiming.13

The higher-value maintainer offer

OpenAI Codex for Open Source is open to core maintainers and people running widely used public projects. The program offers six months of ChatGPT Pro with Codex, possible Codex Security access reviewed case by case, and API credits through the Codex Open Source Fund for work such as pull-request review, maintainer automation, and release workflows.14

There is no deadline stated on the official page. Apply through the Codex for Open Source form if you are a core maintainer with write access to a public project; the page says projects that do not fit neatly should still explain their ecosystem role when applying.14

Free and open-source launches from Product Hunt

Product Hunt’s last-24-hours board also has a few developer-facing launches that are free to try or self-host:

Lettertrace — tracks how often Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini mention a company. Its Product Hunt page describes it as free, bring-your-own-key, developer-first, and open source; it had 365 votes on the board snapshot.15 16
Statewave — an open-source memory runtime for AI agents with durable context, provenance, and self-hosting on Postgres. Its Product Hunt detail describes it as free, Apache 2.0, offline-capable, and usable without an account; it had 29 votes on the board snapshot.17 18

What to star vs. what to claim

Star diagram-design if your bottleneck is turning system ideas into readable diagrams. Star needle if a small local tool-calling model is more useful than another hosted agent. Try switchyard only in a test environment, and read Semantica’s security notes before deploying it around sensitive data.

Claim today: the Epic pair before the August 13 rotation, then check the remaining timers on GamerPower. Apply rather than wait for Codex for Open Source if you maintain a real public project; the official page lists no closing date.