OpenClaw's record-setting growth — 34,168 stars in a single 48-hour window at its peak — is not a proxy for quality assessment. It is a revealed preference: developers choosing an agent architecture where data does not leave the machine. The project's creator, Peter Steinberger, built it as a local-first assistant, and that design decision is what the star count endorses. OpenCode's overtaking of Claude Code on GitHub stars — roughly 157,000 versus 122,000 — follows identical logic: model-agnostic, open harness, no vendor lock-in. The community is voting against dependency, not…