[HN Gopher] Show HN: Quack Companion - VSCode extension for OSS ...
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       Show HN: Quack Companion - VSCode extension for OSS contribution
       assistance
        
       Hello there, I'm FG (short for Francois-Guillaume)! I'm building
       Quack Companion (https://github.com/quack-ai/companion), a tool
       designed to bridge the gap between project maintainers and
       contributors in open-source software (OSS).  If you've ever
       contributed to OSS, you're familiar with the challenge: diving into
       a new codebase, aligning with maintainers' expectations, and making
       meaningful contributions can be daunting. For maintainers, managing
       a flood of contributions and providing guidance while maintaining
       quality is overwhelming. As a contributor to PyTorch & an OSS
       author, I've been on both sides over the years. This challenged me
       to become a better engineer & team player, seeking ways to
       facilitate smooth collaborative software development.  This is
       where Quack steps in, as your AI companion for software team
       alignment. For developers, it's like having a seasoned mentor
       guiding you through the intricacies of a new codebase, offering
       live in-line hints based on the project's guidelines to craft high-
       quality pull requests. For maintainers, it's a practical toolset to
       identify and address workflow inefficiencies and align
       contributions effectively with project objectives.  As code
       generation gets commoditized, aligning these diverse efforts
       becomes critical if you wish to convert individual productivity
       boosts into team velocity. Quack AI is here to solve this
       alignment, and make collaborative software development scale
       without losing any efficiency.  We're committed to keeping the
       service accessible and free for OSS communities while we plan to
       generate revenue from the enterprise suite. The platform (React,
       Next JS), the IDE extension (VSCode) and the backend API (Python,
       FastAPI) are licensed under Apache 2.0. You can find a short demo
       here [1] and the GitHub project here [2].  Our roadmap includes:  *
       offering autocompletion and code chat in the IDE, making the
       contribution process even more intuitive and seamless;  *
       finalizing the transition of the community version to hostable OSS
       models;  * identifying ambiguities or unspecified aspects of a
       given project's guidelines;  * developing a Fitbit-like feature for
       your software development productivity to identify bottlenecks in
       your workflow.  This is still the early days, but we've seen how
       sharing a "public design doc" with the community can significantly
       improve the outcome! How was your experience of managing inbound as
       maintainers? What were your personal hacks to mitigate those
       challenges? We'd love to hear about how it has impacted your
       developer life or if you have any feedback about the above.
       Cheers!  [1] Demo video: https://dub.sh/quack-demo  [2] Open Source
       repo: https://github.com/quack-ai/companion  Our documentation:
       https://docs.quackai.com/
        
       Author : fgfm
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2023-12-20 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | mdaniel wrote:
       | OSS communities ... on GitHub only, seems to be the rest of that
       | sentence: https://github.com/quack-
       | ai/companion/blob/77281d882ff7b90fe...
       | 
       | there is also a tiny mention of it in the readme, but it's often
       | hard to know how many times that's "shorthand" for "git based
       | code forges" versus, as in this case, "we use the github api and
       | others are on the backlog"
       | 
       | In case others went sniffing around looking for "does this use an
       | OpenAI key?" the answer is yes but it's in the Python side:
       | https://github.com/quack-ai/contribution-api#configuration
        
         | fgfm wrote:
         | I appreciate the feedback about clarity, thanks! We'll update
         | the documentation and agree to reflect that more accurately.
         | 
         | For now, we've started with VSCode as an IDE and used GitHub
         | for authentication. But actually, we're already working with
         | GitLab to add support. For other VCS, the prioritization will
         | be demand-based as we don't want to spread thin early on.
         | 
         | Regarding the OpenAI part, as stated in the post, we're
         | currently migrating the community version to self-hosted OSS
         | models. If you sniff around the backend API repo, you'll see
         | there is already a third-party service registered for Ollama
         | and a corresponding docker-compose (https://github.com/quack-
         | ai/contribution-api/blob/main/docke...). Our next release was
         | already planned to switch to Ollama (keeping OpenAI as an
         | alternative as well), so I'm thrilled if that goes along with
         | the community preference!
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-20 23:00 UTC)