Show HN: Onboardly – Ask questions about any GitHub codebase in plain English | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Onboardly – Ask questions about any GitHub codebase in plain English

onboardly-ruddy.vercel.app

1 pointKevStatic3 comments

A few months ago, I asked HN about the biggest pain points when joining a new team (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47368472). Most people said it was the tribal knowledge buried in the code.

I've spent my time as a student building Onboardly to solve this. It’s a web app that indexes your GitHub repo and lets you ask questions in plain English. Unlike a general LLM, it cites the exact files it’s looking at so you can verify the logic.

Tech stack: FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, and a RAG architecture for the indexing. I’m currently hosting it on Render's free tier, so there might be a slight delay on the first login—I'm working on that!

I’d love for you guys to break it and tell me where the answers feel 'off' or what features a dev actually needs for onboarding.

It's free to try — would love feedback on answer quality across different repo types and languages.

https://onboardly-ruddy.vercel.app

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Nice job. I'd say the first question you need to answer would be: Why would somebody use this when Github Copilot Chat exists, lets you chat with any repository, and is integrated into the Github site itself?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/chat

That's fair. Copilot Chat is surely way ahead. As a student, I built this to see if I could create a more 'focused' onboarding experience - maybe even have step by step tour of the codebase, for an organisation. Something specifically that could live outside the IDE for non-technical stakeholders or for generating documentations/summaries that Copilot doesn't prioritise.

Technically, this application is something which I would want to show to my manager at my internship so that for their future interns, they wouldn't have to take so much load and the new interns would just refer to this rapid support.

As a demo project, I think there still can be lots to change, including the managers' references and which code is editable and which is not, etc.

I'm curious: Are there things you find annoying about the Copilot integration? A lightweight, standalone tool could solve something better than the giant and costly Copilot?

> Something specifically that could live outside the IDE for non-technical stakeholders or for generating documentations/summaries that Copilot doesn't prioritise.

I think the terminology might be a bit confusing here. You’re thinking of Copilot the CLI tool, the version that integrates with VS Code and also runs standalone.

I’m talking about GitHub.com’s Copilot - the one built directly into the site itself. If you visit GitHub, you’ll see a small Copilot icon that lets you chat with any repository:

https://imgur.com/a/QpJAL8t

You could definitely still explore this as a quality learning experience. But as something you can monetize, it’s going to be a very steep uphill battle.

I’ve worked at a couple of organizations that have LLM-driven knowledge bases with connectors for Slack, Notion, and all of their private GitHub repositories, and they’re already using them to onboard new devs. It's just a very competitive space.

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