Learn any github code base using archie ai

dHi, I have been a lurking indie developer/builder for a long time. This post is not about that, this post is about building a visual tool to understand any codebase for developer onboarding. With this tool, user can go from 0 to their first commit in less than a few hours.

But before I get started, I wanted to share that this journey was very different than any other projects I have worked on in the past.

I am a full-time dad and have a full-time job that takes away most of my time. Hence, for me it was all about time management and leaving very limited time for doing anything else. But even with those challenges, I decided to give it a try.

Initially, my partner and I started with over 40 different ideas and for each idea, we spent considerable amount of time working through to better understand a few factors.

1. Size of the business($1B)
2. Vertical that we understand and have customers for.
3. Experience
4. Felt the painpoint ourselves
5. Exciting and fun

After we starting marking off the projects that we did not feel strongly about, we started evaluating the ones to understand them better. Met with users, reached out to contacts, asked and understood some basic pain points and finally define relative size of the opportunity.

Once we fully evaluated those options, we landed on an idea that we both really liked. It tooks us a while but eventually we both saw that this is not only in our domain but also something we have experienced and wish the tool existed.

Idea
We landed on building a visual understanding of the codebase. To further explore this space, we looked at a few different companies that were targeting developer pain points and found that no one was focused on new developer productivity. Companies like Google and Facebook spend over 3 months from the time the new software developer gets hired to writing their first commit. We wanted to fix that.

Features
After trying and testing for about 1 month, my partner came up a few very cool and niche visual aspects of a codebase.

1. Summary: Summarize the codebase, present 10 features and deep dive into 5 features.
2. File structure: File structure provides a birds eye view of all the existing files.
3. Commit timeline and Heatmap: Both provide details about the files that are being updated regularly as well as total number of line changes in the code base.

Launch
We launched V1 on April 16th! Try out at www.getarchieai.com. Currently, after signing in, you can test run all the trending repos in Github. We currently have 20 developers signed up and 2 paid developers.

What's next
We plan to apply at YC for Summer'24 batch as well as continue working on this part-time.

If you are a developer and would like to try it, signup at https://www.getarchieai.com and use HALFOFF coupon for 50% off.