# plastic-labs/honcho — health index 93/100 (Exceptional)

> Inspection of the public repository plastic-labs/honcho by inspect.software. It holds a health index of 93 out of 100, placing it in the Exceptional band. The index is a signal derived from publicly visible practice, not a warranty, a security audit, or an endorsement, and it is independent of payment.

- Repository: https://github.com/plastic-labs/honcho
- Report page: https://inspect.software/software/plastic-labs/honcho
- Full JSON report: https://inspect.software/api/repositories/plastic-labs/honcho/report
- Badge: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/inspect-software/badges/main/v1/p/plastic-labs/honcho.svg
- Inspected: 2026-08-05
- Methodology: metrics 2.5.0, report schema 0.31.0 (https://inspect.software/methodology.md)

## Category summary

| Category | Weight | Index | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vitality | 21% | 95/100 | Exceptional |
| Community & Adoption | 17% | 74/100 | Good |
| Sustainability & Governance | 23% | 75/100 | Good |
| Engineering Quality | 19% | 93/100 | Exceptional |
| Security | 16% | 54/100 | Moderate |
| AI Readiness | 4% | 78/100 | Good |

The weighted overall 79 is calibrated to 93 on the published index scale (record calibration 2026-08-02).

## Repository facts

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Memory library for building stateful agents |
| Classification | cli, library, network-service, mcp-server |
| Homepage | https://docs.honcho.dev |
| Primary language | Python |
| License | AGPL-3.0 |
| Stars | 6,456 |
| Forks | 788 |
| Created | 2023-09-10 |
| Last push | 2026-08-05 |
| Latest release | v3.0.12 |
| Commits (last year) | 429 |
| Bus factor | 3 |
| Topics | ai, llm, memory, personalization, embeddings, rag, agent-memory, ai-agents, ai-memory, context-engineering, continual-learning, langchain, long-term-memory, python, state-management, vector-database, anthropic, fastapi, openai, typescript |

## Published packages

| Registry | Package | Latest | Monthly downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
| pypi | honcho | 2.0.0 | 2,146,784 |
| pypi | honcho-cli | 0.1.2 | 1,336 |

## Vitality — 95/100 (Exceptional)

Is the project alive — is code being written and are releases shipping? Weight: 21% of the overall index.

### Development activity — 99/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Push recency | met | 36 / 36 | last push 0 days ago |
| Commit cadence | partial | 35.3 / 36 | 51/52 weeks with commits |
| Commit volume | met | 18 / 18 | 429 commits in the last year |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Maintained | met | 10 / 10 | 30 commit(s) and 10 issue activity found in the last 90 days -- score normalized to 10 |

### Release discipline — 88/100 (Excellent)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): OpenSSF Scorecard: Signed-Releases. Remaining weights renormalized.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ships releases | partial | 16.2 / 27 | 49 version tags (no GitHub releases) |
| Release recency | met | 36 / 36 | latest release 23 days ago |
| Release cadence | met | 27 / 27 | a release every ~15.3 days |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Signed-Releases | excluded | 0 / 10 | no releases found |

### Abandonment — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project is still maintained | met | 100 / 100 | last human commit 0 days ago |

## Community & Adoption — 74/100 (Good)

Does the project have users, downloads, attention, and a welcoming setup for contributors? Weight: 17% of the overall index.

### Popularity & adoption — 92/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | met | 60 / 60 | 6,456 stars |
| Forks | partial | 24.1 / 25 | 788 forks |
| Watchers | partial | 7.9 / 15 | 27 watchers |

### Community health — 70/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| README | met | 22.5 / 22.5 | — |
| License | met | 22.5 / 22.5 | recognized license (AGPL-3.0) |
| CONTRIBUTING guide | met | 18 / 18 | — |
| Code of conduct | not met | 0 / 13.5 | — |
| Issue template | not met | 0 / 7.2 | — |
| PR template | not met | 0 / 6.3 | — |

### Ecosystem adoption (downloads) — 52/100 (Moderate)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Registry dependents. Remaining weights renormalized.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly downloads | partial | 41.7 / 80 | 1,336 downloads/month across pypi |
| Registry dependents | excluded | 0 / 20 | not reported by this ecosystem |

## Sustainability & Governance — 75/100 (Good)

Will the project survive its people — bus factor, responsiveness, who backs it, and package upkeep? Weight: 23% of the overall index.

### Maintainer resilience (bus factor) — 75/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bus factor | partial | 36 / 54 | 3 contributor(s) cover half of all commits |
| Commit distribution | partial | 15.6 / 22.5 | top contributor authored 31% of commits |
| Contributor breadth | met | 13.5 / 13.5 | 49 contributors |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Contributors | met | 10 / 10 | project has 5 contributing companies or organizations |

### Issue & PR responsiveness — 68/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issue resolution | partial | 22.8 / 42 | 54% of issues closed |
| PR acceptance | partial | 20.3 / 30 | 475/702 decided PRs merged |
| Newcomer PR acceptance | met | 13 / 13 | 4/4 first-time contributors' PRs merged in 30d |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Code-Review | partial | 12 / 15 | Found 24/27 approved changesets -- score normalized to 8 |

### Ownership & stewardship — 67/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership backing | met | 30 / 30 | organization-owned |
| Verified domain | not met | 0 / 20 | — |
| Owner reach | partial | 18.2 / 25 | 342 followers of plastic-labs |
| Track record | partial | 19.2 / 25 | 46 public repos, account ~3 yr old |

### Package maintenance — 92/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Published & resolvable | met | 25 / 25 | 1 package(s) on pypi |
| Publish recency | met | 35 / 35 | latest publish 16 days ago |
| Version history | partial | 12 / 20 | 3 published versions |
| Not deprecated | met | 20 / 20 | active, not deprecated or yanked |

## Engineering Quality — 93/100 (Exceptional)

Are baseline engineering and documentation practices in place? Weight: 19% of the overall index.

### Engineering practices — 88/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| CI workflows | met | 24 / 24 | 11 workflow(s) |
| Tests present | met | 24 / 24 | — |
| Linter config | met | 16 / 16 | biome.json |
| Pre-commit hooks | met | 9.6 / 9.6 | — |
| .editorconfig | not met | 0 / 6.4 | — |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: CI-Tests | partial | 14 / 20 | 21 out of 27 merged PRs checked by a CI test -- score normalized to 7 |

### Documentation — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| README | met | 30 / 30 | — |
| Documentation directory | met | 25 / 25 | — |
| Documentation / homepage site | met | 15 / 15 | https://docs.honcho.dev |
| Repository description | met | 10 / 10 | — |
| Topics | met | 10 / 10 | 20 topics |
| Wiki | met | 10 / 10 | — |

## Security — 54/100 (Moderate)

Are visible security and supply-chain practices strong, with no malicious dependency and no unresolved high-risk jurisdiction exposure? Weight: 16% of the overall index.

### Security posture — 58/100 (Moderate)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Signed-Releases. Remaining weights renormalized.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binary-Artifacts | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | no binaries found in the repo |
| Branch-Protection | partial | 3.8 / 7.5 | branch protection is not maximal on development and all release branches |
| CI-Tests | partial | 1.8 / 2.5 | 21 out of 27 merged PRs checked by a CI test -- score normalized to 7 |
| CII-Best-Practices | not met | 0 / 2.5 | no effort to earn an OpenSSF best practices badge detected |
| Code-Review | partial | 6 / 7.5 | Found 24/27 approved changesets -- score normalized to 8 |
| Contributors | met | 2.5 / 2.5 | project has 5 contributing companies or organizations |
| Dangerous-Workflow | met | 10 / 10 | no dangerous workflow patterns detected |
| Dependency-Update-Tool | not met | 0 / 7.5 | no update tool detected |
| Fuzzing | not met | 0 / 5 | project is not fuzzed |
| License | met | 2.5 / 2.5 | license file detected |
| Maintained | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | 30 commit(s) and 10 issue activity found in the last 90 days -- score normalized to 10 |
| Packaging | met | 5 / 5 | packaging workflow detected |
| Pinned-Dependencies | not met | 0 / 5 | dependency not pinned by hash detected -- score normalized to 0 |
| SAST | partial | 3.5 / 5 | SAST tool is not run on all commits -- score normalized to 7 |
| Security-Policy | not met | 0 / 5 | security policy file not detected |
| Signed-Releases | excluded | 0 / 7.5 | no releases found |
| Token-Permissions | partial | 6 / 7.5 | detected GitHub workflow tokens with excessive permissions |
| Vulnerabilities | not met | 0 / 7.5 | 244 existing vulnerabilities detected |

### Dependency advisories — 40/100 (Weak)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Indirect dependencies free of known advisories. Remaining weights renormalized. Matched 292 resolved dependencies against OSV; 25 could not be assessed (no resolved version, an unsupported ecosystem, or beyond the reported package list). This repository publishes no package the index resolves, so the repository dependency graph was assessed instead. That graph mixes development and test pins with shipped dependencies, so only the declared runtime dependencies are scored; transitive findings are reported as context and excluded from the score. Reachability is not analyzed.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct dependencies free of known advisories | partial | 6.3 / 35 | 8 affected: click 8.1.8 (high 7.2), click 8.3.1 (high 7.2), json-repair 0.25.3 (high 7.5), +5 more |
| Indirect dependencies free of known advisories | excluded | 0 / 25 | transitive set not separable from development and test dependencies in this scope |
| No advisories left outstanding | partial | 23.4 / 40 | 4 advisory-carrying package(s) unaddressed past 90 days; oldest published 370 days ago |

### Malicious dependencies — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| No dependency reported as a malicious package | met | 100 / 100 | no dependency is reported as a malicious package |

### High-Risk Jurisdiction Exposure — 100/100 (Exceptional)

Only high-confidence self-published location evidence affects this multiplier. Ambiguous matches are review-only; country evidence is not proof of nationality, citizenship, legal registration, malicious intent, or sanctions status.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Policy exposure multiplier | met | 100 / 100 | no confirmed policy-scope location match |

## AI Readiness — 78/100 (Good)

How well is the repo equipped to be developed and maintained with AI coding agents? Carries a deliberately small weight: agent tooling is a real maintenance signal, but its absence must never gate the top of the scale (calibration saturates at raw 91, so 100/100 remains reachable with AI Readiness at zero).

### Agent context & guidance — 85/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent instructions | met | 45 / 45 | CLAUDE.md |
| Machine-readable docs (llms.txt) | not met | 0 / 15 | — |
| Legible commit history | met | 40 / 40 | 92 of 100 human commits state their intent (structured subject or explanatory body) |

### Verify loop (build / test / typecheck) — 64/100 (Moderate)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-command bootstrap | not met | 0 / 18 | — |
| Automated tests | met | 22 / 22 | — |
| Lint / format config | met | 11 / 11 | biome.json |
| Static type checking | met | 11 / 11 | mcp/tsconfig.json, sdks/typescript/tsconfig.json |
| Reproducible environment | met | 10 / 10 | Dockerfile, lockfile |
| Demonstrated agent practice | met | 10 / 10 | 30 of the last 100 commits agent-authored or agent-credited |
| Automated maintenance | not met | 0 / 8 | no automated dependency updates observed |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Pinned-Dependencies | not met | 0 / 10 | dependency not pinned by hash detected -- score normalized to 0 |

### Code legibility for models — 81/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type-checkable code | partial | 27 / 45 | Python with type-check config (mcp/tsconfig.json, sdks/typescript/tsconfig.json) |
| Manageable file sizes | partial | 54.1 / 55 | 8/472 source files over 60KB |

### Machine-readable interfaces — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| API schema (OpenAPI/GraphQL/proto) | met | 40 / 40 | docs/v1/openapi.json, docs/v2/openapi.json, docs/v3/openapi.json |
| MCP server | met | 20 / 20 | — |
| Runnable examples | met | 40 / 40 | examples, recipes |

## Collection warnings

- Star history unavailable: GitHub GraphQL error: Resource not accessible by personal access token
- First-time contributor figures cover 12 of 23 authors (cap 12)
- pypi package 'honcho' points at a different repository (https://github.com/nickstenning/honcho); excluded from ecosystem scoring
- Could not fetch npm package 'honcho-mcp' from its registry
- Advisory severity resolved for 120 of 188 advisories (lookup cap); the remainder are reported as unknown severity

## What this report is

inspect.software measures public repositories against a single published, versioned methodology and reports the result as a 1–100 health index. Findings are signals derived from what is visible in public repository data — they are not a security audit, a warranty, or an endorsement, and no result depends on payment.

- Methodology, formulas and weights: https://inspect.software/methodology.md
- What a result does and does not claim: https://inspect.software/wiki/signals-not-warranties.md
- Rating bands: https://inspect.software/wiki/scoring-bands.md
- Corrections: https://inspect.software/contact.md
- Index of all documents: https://inspect.software/llms.txt