GitHub's own agent-workflow repo has 376 issues, 1 PR

GitHub's gh-aw project, a tool for building agentic workflows, has 376 open issues and exactly 1 open pull request. The repo sits at 5,121 stars and was pushed as of September 10, 2026, so it's not stalled. It's just not taking patches.

That gap matters because open-issues counts and open-PR counts look the same at a glance, both just numbers on a repo page, but they measure opposite things. Issues measure how many people hit a problem and reported it. PRs measure how many people tried to fix one and got it merged. A repo can have both numbers high, both low, or split hard in either direction, and gh-aw is the sharpest split in this set.

376 to 1 reads as a first-party team running triage on a large bug backlog while keeping the codebase closed to outside changes, whether by review bandwidth, design control, or something else GitHub hasn't said. The repo doesn't explain the imbalance, so there's no way to tell from the numbers alone whether external PRs are getting rejected, ignored, or just not attempted.

If you're evaluating a repo for how community-maintained it actually is, the star count and the open-issues count are the wrong inputs. Pull the PR count too. A project with 5,000 stars and a single-digit PR queue is being run top-down no matter how many issues pile up underneath it. Watch whether that PR count moves before assuming this one opens up.