Branch was a social network built on top of GitHub. You signed in, it read your followers and the people you followed, then walked outward through their networks to find the developers your circle had in common that you had not met yet. It tagged everyone by the tools in their public repos, with a particular eye on who was building with AI.
It was one of my first AI-assisted builds: Claude Code, Bun, and a SQLite file, shipped in a few weeks in the fall of 2025. The app is retired and the database is gone, but the idea still holds. GitHub is already a social graph; it just does not act like one. The code is public.
Branch connected people building at the intersection of AI and code: developers who experiment, remix, and create new tools.
Sign in with GitHub and Branch pulled your followers, following, and public repos.
A breadth-first walk through your network surfaced the people most of your connections already followed, ranked by mutual connections.
Languages, frameworks and services from each repo became tags, so you could browse everyone using a given tool.
Claude, Copilot, Cursor and the rest were tracked as their own layer: who was building with what, and who was vibe coding.