Company software still stops on Friday
Everyone agrees AI agents are writing a lot more code, and people mostly judge that by counting pull requests on GitHub. There's another record that nobody built for this, which is how many packages get downloaded on a Sunday.
Package registries count every download, every day, and software has always kept a working week. On npm, which serves nearly all JavaScript, a weekend day got about a quarter of a weekday's downloads for years.
That's changed. A weekend day now gets 48%, except for the software companies pay for, which still stops on Friday.
This is npm's average week, with a normal weekday as 100%, so the dip in the middle is the weekend. You can drag along the bottom to see any year since 2019.
Other languages are going the same way
npm could have been a one-off, so I checked the registries for other languages. Ruby and Rust turned within months of npm, and PHP held out until this summer. Python has been around 60% for years, I'd guess because so much of it runs on servers on a schedule, and I'd expect the others to level off around there.
This chart shows how busy a weekend day is compared with a weekday, for each language. I've added people reading about code on Wikipedia as a check, and that line hasn't moved, so I don't think this is everyone working more weekends.
A weekend day as a % of a weekday
The tools companies use have barely changed
To see what was behind this, I ranked about 4,000 of the most downloaded npm packages by how busy their weekends are. The bottom of the list is tools you'd mostly find at a company, like feature flags, paid monitoring, SAP and Salesforce. The top is what people reach for when they're making something new, like a database or a phone app.
Here are a few from each end. A figure of 20% means a Saturday gets a fifth of what a normal weekday gets.
Tools you’d mostly find at a company
Tools people use to make something new
Datadog is the clearest example. Its library has grown 5 times in two years and has barely moved on this chart, so nearly all of that growth has come from Monday to Friday.
Other languages split the same way. On Ruby's registry, Datadog is at 15% and Kamal, a deploy tool for small teams, is at 75%.
It's happening on laptops as well
About 96% of these installs are on Linux, which mostly means servers and cloud sandboxes, so you might assume this is just machines running around the clock. I did. I expected Macs and Windows laptops to still have quiet weekends, and they don't.
Some packages ship a different build for each kind of computer, so you can count them, and this chart adds up four of those. The Mac line is jumpy because there aren't many to count.
A weekend day as a % of a weekday
Python's registry records the operating system directly, and Macs there have gone from 46% to 65%.
Look up any package
Type any npm package to see how busy its weekends are compared with its weekdays, against npm as a whole.
What's doing this?
A registry doesn't know who's downloading, and its counts include caches and bots, so I can't prove any of this. GitHub says agents started more than 40% of pull requests in September, and Amplifying, who got there first on this, finds that those pull requests barely drop at weekends, except for Copilot's agent, the one companies mostly buy.
People have always started side projects at weekends. create-next-app, which sets up a new website, was already at 72% in 2024. What's new is that an agent lets one person do far more on a Saturday, and that means far more installs.
That would explain why laptops moved, and why the tools for new apps moved most. It also fits the time of day. I counted pull requests from Claude Code's branches by hour, and the quietest four hours run 31% below the busiest, so a lot of them have someone awake at the other end.
That daily dip is only about half of what Hacker News comments show, so a lot of agent work does carry on while people sleep. An agent in a fresh sandbox reinstalls everything each time, so one person can cause thousands of installs.
left-pad is my favourite evidence. Its weekend traffic has more than tripled in two years, while its weekday traffic is up about a quarter. Nobody is choosing left-pad on a Sunday.
npm's line also steepens at the new year, which is when GitHub's CTO says agent workflows accelerated sharply. I can't separate this from the theory above, because a registry can't tell a person with an agent from an agent on its own.
jest-junit and sonarqube-scanner are almost only used in CI, and they're still at 24% and 20%. If CI had stopped keeping office hours, they'd have moved with everything else. CI that an agent sets off is part of the theories above, but ordinary CI at companies still stops on Friday.
Something does fetch everything without looking. esbuild's build for IBM mainframes gets 2.1M downloads a day, and I doubt much of that is mainframes.
It doesn't add up to much, though. A random package nobody uses gets about two downloads a day, spread evenly through the week. Across about 4.6M packages that's roughly 8M a day, which is 0.02% of a weekday. The share also didn't step up after the worm that spread through npm in May, when there was the most reason to scan.
npm's stats do break. It has reported zero downloads on 12 days since August, and I've left those days out. But a change in counting wouldn't move PHP, Ruby and Rust as well, and it wouldn't skip SAP and Salesforce.
There are strange days. On 21 June 2025 npm did 9.3B downloads against a normal Saturday's 4.5B, which looks like a few huge jobs rather than lots of people. Download counts can be pumped, and I can't say how much of the total is like this. But someone faking it would have had to leave out Datadog and SAP on purpose.
Christmas will test this
Christmas Day is the day nearly everyone stops. npm did 31% of a weekday on Christmas Day last year, about what a weekend did at the time, so I'd guess about 44% this year. A lot less would mean it's mostly people, who do stop for Christmas, and 48% or more would mean it's mostly machines running by themselves.
I'll also watch Datadog. If it starts climbing, agents have started working weekends inside companies too, and the title of this piece stops being true.
I went into this expecting to find machines that never stop, and I think that's only part of it. A lot of it looks like people making things in their own time, with agents that carry on after they've gone to bed.
The working week in these numbers was really a record of who made software. It was made by people with jobs, so everything around them stopped when they did. Companies still work like that, and I'd guess they'll keep most of it, because someone has to review what ships and that person still goes home on Friday. Most of the growth is coming from people who don't have to wait for them.
I don't think much has changed if you sell to companies. But if your customers are people who build things, Sunday is turning into a normal day, so I'd look at your own graphs before planning around a quiet weekend.