nowfound

AI · December 20, 2023

QC

Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance

Hello there, I'm FG (short for François-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…

In plain words

Quack Companion is a Visual Studio Code extension that helps open-source contributors understand project expectations and maintainers guide contributors more effectively. It uses AI to bridge communication gaps between project teams by providing contributors with context about codebases and helping maintainers streamline contribution management. The tool addresses the common challenge of aligning new contributors with project standards and maintainer expectations in collaborative software development.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello there, I'm FG (short for François-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/

Does the same job

all alternatives →
  • Hey!2024 · ▲377

    AI-powered pair programming friend

  • DepsHub2024 · ▲360

    Update dependencies using AI

  • CA
    ChunkHound, a local-first tool for understanding large codebasesJan 2026 · github.com · ▲114

    ChunkHound’s goal is simple: local-first codebase intelligence that helps you pull deep, core-dev-level insights on demand, generate always-up-to-date docs, and scale from small repos to enterprise monorepos — while staying free + open source and provider-agnostic (VoyageAI / OpenAI / Qwen3, Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Grok, and more). I’d love your feedback — and if you have, thank you for being part of the journey!

  • CoderrrJan 2026 · ▲96

    Open source CLI-first AI coding companion

  • Sidekick2022 · ▲263

    Like Chrome DevTools for your backend, now open source

  • Code Companion2023 · ▲106

    A GPT-4 based tutor which provides feedback for programming

More ai this month

the category →
  • I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.

    AI · 17d ago · simedw.com

  • Astute585

    Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators

    AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com

  • Grok Bot547

    AI teammates that you can give real work to

    AI · 25d ago · x.ai

  • Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…

    AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com

  • Monid474

    OpenRouter for agent tools

    AI · 6d ago · monid.ai

  • Turn website visitors into qualified pipeline

    AI · 19d ago · clarasdr.ai

Launched alongside, December 2023

the whole month →
  • BM

    Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…

    Commerce · 2023 · beeper.com

  • HA

    Hey! I made Heynote entirely for my own use case. For many years, I always had an Emacs instance running with the scratch buffer open, even long after I had abandoned Emacs as my programming editor in favor of more recent IDE:s. The simplicity of having just one big scratch buffer appeals to me, but I still want to separate the different things I jot down somehow (without using tabs or similar). Previously, my solution was to insert a bunch of blank lines between the notes, but hitting C-A would still select the entire buffer. That's why I came up with the concept of "blocks", which turned…

    Work · 2023 · heynote.com

  • LogoFast988

    Make beautiful logos with AI, fast & free

    AI · 2023 · logofa.st

  • FuseBase941

    Client collaboration platform for professional services

    Dev tools · 2023 · thefusebase.com

  • Beep! 2.0871

    Fastest tool to assign and share visual tasks with your team

    Work · 2023 · justbeepit.com

  • Clean up your inbox in minutes, open source

    AI · 2023 · getinboxzero.com