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Strapi Onboarding Assistant — powered by IBM Bob
Problem Joining a large open-source codebase is slow and error-prone. Strapi, a popular headless CMS, is a monorepo with dozens of packages, a heavy setup and many unwritten rules. Even its own documentation disagrees: AGENTS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, package.json and .nvmrc give four different Node.js requirements, and the docs say Yarn 1.2+ while the config pins Yarn 4.12. New contributors lose hours before writing a single line of code. Solution The Strapi Onboarding Assistant uses IBM Bob as its core engine to read the repository and produce a complete onboarding kit: - Architecture guide: package map, request lifecycle, app lifecycle and common pitfalls, every claim tied to a real file and line. - Four end-to-end feature traces (publish, login, content-type creation, file upload) from the admin UI to the database, each with a Mermaid diagram and "Where would I change X?" guidance. - Setup guide and setup doctor script that check your machine and explain the version conflicts. - Convention Guard: a zero-dependency CLI that checks code against Strapi's contribution rules (deprecated Entity Service, global strapi, Conventional Commits and more), with 22 passing unit tests. It found real violations in current Strapi files. - Starter tasks, role-based learning paths and a 10-question quiz. - "Strapi Onboarding Buddy", a custom IBM Bob mode that answers newcomer questions from the verified guides with file and line citations. Target users and how they interact New open-source contributors and engineers joining a team. They open the web portal (GitHub Pages, no install), use the CLI (node src/onboard.js), or ask the Onboarding Buddy mode inside Bob IDE. Maintainers can use Convention Guard to catch common mistakes before a PR. What makes it unique It is grounded, not generic: every statement points to a source line that newcomers can check. Bob's Orchestrator mode traced three features in parallel, and by comparing the traces Bob found a cross-cutting insight: publish, content-type creation and upload all emit eventHub events, so plugins can extend them without touching core code. The tool also surfaces contradictions in official docs that humans usually discover by trial and error. Impact By our estimates, finding the publish logic drops from 4–8 hours to about 5 minutes, and getting a working local setup from 2–4 hours to about 10 minutes. The workflow is repo-agnostic: Strapi is the demo target, but the same Bob prompts work on any large codebase. Data and license We analysed the public strapi/strapi repository (develop branch, MIT-licensed Community Edition). Enterprise Edition (ee/) directories were excluded. No personal, client or confidential data was used.
27 Sep 2026
