Show HN: Onboardly – Ask questions about any GitHub codebase in plain English (onboardly-ruddy.vercel.app)

1 points by KevStatic 5mo ago ↗ HN

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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vunderba 5mo ago ↗

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