MilestoFund Onboard Guide

Every time a developer joins a new project, or moves between projects or squads, or moves back into a project after months of absence, they have to spend a lot of time figuring out how the code works from scratch. Which files deal with authentication, how the frontend, backend, and database communicate, and what's the exact flow of making a payment. When working on a real application (and not a school project), it takes 6-8 hours of trial and error for a developer to get a good enough sense of the code to make their first meaningful contribution. And this is for every new developer, contractor, or team that joins the project. The root cause of this issue is that documentation is often outdated, incomplete, or nonexistant because it's tedious to write and update. New developers end up spending the time reading the code instead of reading documentation because documentation is often nonexistant or out of date. I propose an AI powered onboarding guide which is automatically generated using IBM Bob 2.0. I demonstrate this on MilestoFund, a crowdfunding platform which I built with authentication, a PostgreSQL database hosted through Supabase, razorpay payments, and an AI assistant built with Gemini. By using Bob 2.0's agent mode, and giving it full context of the repository, I am able to generate an onboarding guide that thoroughly describes the tech stack, folder structure, communication between frontend, backend and database, the payment flow, the AI integration, and recommended reading order of files to understand the code. The onboarding guide is generated as a web application, which has a sidebar matching the guide's file structure, a checklist of files to go through with the ability to check off files as complete (with the state being saved in local storage), displays a progress bar indicating how much of the onboarding has been completed, and indicates how much time the onboarding would save compared to spending 6 hours going through this guide (30 minutes). This makes onboarding less like reading documentation, and more like using a product. The target audience for this product is developers or contractors who are new to a code base, or new to a company, and have to learn an existing code base. They would use this product by opening the link to the onboarding guide, and going through the checklist at their own pace. The value of this product can be seen in how much a single onboarding guide can be used. Every new developer joining the project can benefit from this guide, and it only takes a few hours to generate. Additionally, this can be used for any repository, and for every new developer joining the project. For companies that rely on contractors and campus hiring, this could drastically reduce the amount of time spent onboarding new developers, and save senior developers from spending their time guiding new junior developers through the code. The technical challenge I've solved here was a problem I encountered as a student developer, having to figure out how other people's code worked. Bob 2.0 let me solve this problem in a single weekend, on my own.