Top 10 GitHub — Trending Python — May 18–May 24, 2026

During the week of May 18–24, 2026, GitHub's Python trending chart split cleanly into four practitioner categories: API discovery, AI agent frameworks, media acquisition, and developer education—each with a distinct audience and use case. public-apis (435,599 ⭐) is the canonical starting point when you need a free third-party endpoint fast; its 1,400+ entries are organized by category and auth type, making it the first tab to open before writing any integration scaffold. yt-dlp (162,891 ⭐), the actively maintained fork of the deprecated youtube-dl, handles geo-restricted and format-complex downloads that browser extensions can't touch—a one-liner like `yt-dlp -f "bestvideo+bestaudio" --merge-output-format mp4 <URL>` covers the majority of real-world cases. NousResearch/hermes-agent (155,516 ⭐) targets developers who want OpenAI-compatible tool-calling loops without GPT-4 pricing; built on the Hermes-3 model family, it's best suited for local or self-hosted inference pipelines where latency and cost control matter more than frontier-model capability. The remaining seven repos span free programming books, structured-output libraries, and data-science tooling—all Python 3.11+ compatible and carrying commits within the last 30 days, a reliable signal that these aren't graveyard projects riding old stars.