Suggestions

[cookiengineer]

Damn, that's actually a very very nice idea. I think the downvotes on reddit are because of people misunderstanding what the project is about.

I (think) I had a similar idea for my project lychee.js where I encourage people to add a collaborator to their project; which represents the AI and allows software bots to automatically commit and push to their repositories or make pull-requests. It currently uses pull requests because they are easy to maintain quality-wise.

I think if you shim up the UI and instructions a bit, people would love this tool if it could generate links for them easily. Imagine a server that runs on contribut.in/user/repo that automatically fills in the necessary data and that people can link to.

My suggestions on what I have in mind:

• Polish up the UI instructions and how it works (a little 1,2,3 step chart?)
• Let people know how it works, what user account is the bot and how they can get contributors (how to make a link for the app etc.)
• How does it manage quality? Is everything made by pull requests (so there's no difference in upstream/downstream merges) - or - does it aim to automate pull requests from downstream forks - or - does it automatically commit to their projects? How do people let only qualitative commits in?
• Does it also work with alternatives like gitlab, bitbucket or raw git projects? (that would be an uber use case)

[morriswchris]

Thanks for the suggestions @cookiengineer!

You're right in that I should clean up the usefulness of the project (I've been meaning to write a blog post, but alas never had the time). Essentially my vision for this project would be left up the repo owner to choose how open the project would be. With all the enhancements Github has made to pull requests there are various options. For instance permissions could be:

• open for commits to master, or the ability to merge your own changes
• restrict changes to master, but can merge your own pull requests
• restrict changes to master, and a pull request needs to be approved by 1 other contributor
• restrict changes to master, and a pull request needs to be approved by admin/repo owner (similar to current process, except does not require you to fork the project)

As of right now, this doesn't actually use a bot. Its a full blown github api integration, so all that is required is an API token with repo access. Because of this, it currently does not work with other version controls, but that could be easily setup when deploying the project (adding a SERVICE ENV to choose the right api perhaps).

I would love some help getting this to a more digestible state! If you'd like to help out, join (or even just to see the Pull Requests in action with review guards)

morriswchris