Ongoing Copilot

Problem Joining a new codebase is one of the slowest, most frustrating parts of a developer's job. New hires, open-source contributors and students face hundreds of unfamiliar files, outdated or missing documentation, and no clear place to start. Senior engineers lose hours answering the same questions, and newcomers can spend weeks before making a first meaningful contribution. Generic tutorials don't help: every repository is different, and every developer arrives with a different skill level and role. Solution Developer Onboarding Copilot turns any GitHub repository into a personalised, interactive learning journey, from first clone to first pull request. The user pastes a repository URL, and the system automatically analyses it: languages, frameworks, entry points, directory structure and test suites. It then combines this analysis with the developer's profile (experience level, role such as frontend, backend or fullstack, and personal goals) to generate a day-by-day onboarding plan with concrete tasks, time estimates and the exact files to read. Target users New team members onboarding into company codebases Open-source newcomers who want to contribute but don't know where to begin Students and junior developers learning from real-world projects Engineering managers and maintainers who want to scale onboarding without spending their own time How users interact with it Through a clean web dashboard, the developer follows their plan and tracks progress task by task. When stuck, they ask questions in a codebase-aware chat that answers with references to specific files, like a senior colleague who is always available. After completing a task, they submit their code and receive instant AI feedback against the task's acceptance criteria. When ready, the copilot suggests beginner-safe first contributions based on real gaps in the codebase, and generates a pull request title, description and pre-merge checklist. What makes it creative and unique Most AI coding tools help developers write code. Ours helps them understand code, and it covers the whole path from confusion to contribution in one guided flow instead of isolated features. Plans adapt to the person, not just the project: a beginner fullstack developer and an advanced backend engineer get different journeys through the same repository. The backend also exposes standard MCP endpoints, so its tools can plug directly into IBM watsonx Orchestrate and other agent workflows. Built with IBM Bob and watsonx We used IBM Bob throughout development to design the architecture and to generate and refine the FastAPI backend, React components, prompt templates, tests and documentation. This let a small team ship a full-stack product within the hackathon timeline. All AI reasoning runs on IBM watsonx with Granite models, through a vendor-agnostic provider layer. Impact By replacing weeks of unstructured exploration with a tailored, step-by-step plan, instant answers and validated practice, the copilot shortens time to first contribution, reduces the burden on senior engineers, and makes any codebase approachable for anyone.