Adoption dailySeptember 29, 2026Agent stack

Passkeys and AI agents are rewiring the identity layer

Rising adoption of passkeys at 887k/day intersects with AI agent growth at 653k/day, forcing developers to rethink how non-human entities verify access without passwords.

The numbers: Small modular reactors is today's fastest-rising trend: Wikipedia readers at 1.36× the four-week pace. Momentum across 1 signal: 1.36×. 3 of 21 trends are climbing and 1 are cooling.

Backfilled on October 7, 2026 using only data published by September 29, 2026.

Small modular reactors: 595 Wikipedia readers a day on a typical day last week, against 437 the four weeks before

Bars are single days, the line is the 7-day average, the shaded band is the last 7 days and the dashed line is the four-week typical day (median).

Data through npm 09/27, Wikipedia 09/28, HN 09/28. Source: Wikimedia pageviews API, user agents only.

Passkeys gained 1.33× momentum to reach 887k daily installs, while AI agents climbed 1.21× to 653k daily installs. This simultaneous rise marks a practical collision: autonomous software now needs secure, passwordless methods to act on behalf of users. The old login model breaks when the user is a script, not a person typing a code.

AI API SDKs are also steady at 18M daily installs, showing the plumbing for these agents is already in place. Yet the security layer lags. As agents handle sensitive tasks, relying on shared credentials or weak tokens creates risk. Passkeys offer a cryptographic standard that works for both humans and machines, reducing the need for complex key management in agent workflows.

The connection is operational. Builders deploying AI agents must integrate passkey-based authentication to avoid bottlenecks. This is not just a login change; it is a rearchitecture of trust. As agent usage grows, the ability to verify identity without human intervention becomes a core requirement for any production system handling data or transactions.

Watch next: Track whether major AI agent frameworks ship built-in passkey support in their next releases.

Column drafted by qwen/qwen3.8-27b from the numbers below; every figure checked against them.

The numbers

The Wikipedia article "Small modular reactor" drew 595 readers on a typical day last week, 1.36× its four-week norm of 437.

Next on the board: Passkeys at 1.33×, led by installs at 1.33× (887k on a typical day against 667k).

Quiet adoption: Bun runtime installs run at 1.18× their four-week pace while attention sits at 0.84×. Developers are adding it faster than people are reading about it.

Cooling fastest: Robotaxis at 0.81×, with Wikipedia readers down to 203 on a typical day from 251. Part of that is a spike on Sep 8 in the weeks before.

The long view: OpenAI Codex installs over the last four weeks are 116× the same four weeks a year earlier (3.4M a day against 29k).

Trend pages: Small modular reactors Passkeys AI agents Robotaxis

Quiet adoption

3 of 21 trends are climbing; Small modular reactors leads at 1.36×

Momentum is a typical day (median) of the last 7 divided by a typical day of the 28 before, averaged across every signal with enough data. 1× means no change. Rings mark each signal.

Data through npm 09/27, Wikipedia 09/28, HN 09/28. Source: npm downloads API, Wikimedia pageviews, Hacker News search.

4 of 7 developer tools are being installed faster than they are being read about

Across: attention momentum (Wikipedia readers and Hacker News stories). Up: install momentum (npm). Both on log scales; the 1× lines split the corners.

Data through npm 09/27, Wikipedia 09/28, HN 09/28. Source: npm downloads API, Wikimedia pageviews, Hacker News search.

Small modular reactors draws the most Wikipedia readers against its own normal: 1.36× over the last week

Each cell is one day's readers divided by that trend's four-week typical day. Orange runs hot, dark runs cold.

Data through npm 09/27, Wikipedia 09/28, HN 09/28. Source: Wikimedia pageviews API, user agents only.

Every number on the board

All 22 trends, September 29, 2026. Per-day figures are a typical (median) day of the last week. * = base too small to count (under 1,000 installs, 100 readers or 1 story a day).

Small modular reactors	Energy	1.36×	Climbing	–	–	595	1.36×	0.0	0×*	0
Passkeys	Web platform	1.33×	Climbing	887k	1.33×	90	1.09×*	0.4	1×*	0
AI agents	AI agents	1.21×	Climbing	653k	1.19×	1,180	1.22×	13	1.21×	0
Smart glasses	Devices	1.14×	Steady	–	–	257	1.14×	1.1	2.5×*	0
AI API SDKs	AI agents	1.13×	Steady	18M	1.13×	–	–	–	–	0
WebGPU	Web platform	1.12×	Steady	1.5M	1.13×	135	1.11×	0.9	1.26×*	0
Vibe coding	AI coding	1.09×	Steady	–	–	1,687	1.22×	1.1	0.97×	0
SpaceX Starship	Space	1.08×	Steady	–	–	1,475	1.08×	1.6	6.3×*	0
Starlink	Space	1.07×	Steady	–	–	2,123	1.07×	0.9	2.2×*	0
Gemini CLI	AI coding	1.03×	Steady	64k	1.03×	–	–	0.0	n/a*	0
Solid-state batteries	Energy	1.03×	Steady	–	–	401	1.03×	0.0	0×*	0
Heat pumps	Energy	1.03×	Steady	–	–	489	1.03×	0.1	2×*	0
Model Context Protocol	AI agents	1.01×	Steady	10M	1.14×	1,538	1.08×	5.9	0.82×	0
Humanoid robots	Robots	1.01×	Steady	–	–	370	1×	0.6	0.61×*	0
Bun runtime	Web platform	1×	Steady	715k	1.18×	213	0.84×	0.6	0.59×*	0
OpenAI Codex	AI coding	0.98×	Steady	3.5M	1.06×	39	1.11×*	3.9	0.9×	0
Local LLMs	AI agents	0.97×	Steady	164k	0.91×	708	1.03×	0.6	0.84×*	0
Quantum computing	Devices	0.97×	Steady	–	–	1,879	1.07×	2.9	0.87×	1
Claude Code	AI coding	0.9×	Steady	2.0M	0.8×	–	–	6.9	1×	0
eVTOL air taxis	Space	0.9×	Steady	–	–	185	0.9×	0.0	0×*	0
Robotaxis	Robots	0.81×	Cooling	–	–	203	0.81×	0.0	0×*	0
Vehicle-to-grid	Energy	n/a	Not enough data	–	–	63	1.02×*	0.0	0×*	0

Method and sources

Every trend gets up to three free, daily signals. Installs: npm registry downloads for the packages named on each trend page (developer adoption; it counts CI and mirrors too, so it measures direction, not people). Attention: English Wikipedia readers per day, human agents only, and Hacker News stories with the term in the title. For each signal we divide a typical day (the median) of the last 7 complete days by a typical day of the 28 days before. Medians keep one launch-day spike from carrying a whole week; both windows are whole weeks, so weekend dips sit equally in both. Momentum is the geometric mean of the signals that clear a minimum base. npm reports some days as zero for every package at once; we treat those as missing.

The column is drafted by a free language model from the day's computed facts only, and is published only if every number in it matches those facts; otherwise the computed paragraphs stand alone. Theme labels come from Jev (or its Cloudflare Clef fallback, as noted) choosing from a fixed list of ten.

Stages: Breakout 1.5× and up, Climbing 1.15×, Steady 0.87× to 1.15×, Cooling below. Raw data: /api/trends/2026-09-29.json.