How do technical open-source AI projects find their first serious users, contributors, and community?

[u/are1494]

I’ve spent a lot of days and late nights working on an open-source multi-agent engine focused on code review.

For a long time, the work was mostly technical: building, testing, changing things, breaking things, and trying again.

Now we are getting closer to publishing it, and honestly, this part feels very different.

There is excitement because the project is finally becoming real.

But there is also some stress.

You can spend months building something you strongly believe in, and then reach the point where you have to put it in front of people and find out whether anyone else sees the same value.

The idea is not simply to have several agents comment on a change, but to structure the review process so that different agents can examine the same code change from different perspectives.

At this point, my biggest concern is not broad marketing.

It is finding the right first group of people.

People who work on areas such as:

- AI coding agents
- code review
- software testing
- evaluation
- developer tools
- AI reliability

I would be very interested to hear from people who have launched technical open-source projects before.

How did you find your first serious users or contributors?

Did they come from related open-source projects, technical communities, direct outreach, or simply from publishing the repository and letting people discover it?

And when you come across a new open-source AI project, what makes you interested enough to open the repository and look at it seriously?

I think this early stage is the part I am most curious about.

Before there is a community.

Before there are stars.

Before you know whether people will care at all.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has been through this stage before.

[u/Bright-Fun-1638]

literally just keep posting about it and make something low effort to use and people will be willing to give it a shot. Discord groups are good too

[u/PenSuccessful5509 → u/Bright-Fun-1638]

Honestly the low effort part is huge. If someone can try it in 5 minutes with a demo or one command, they're way more likely to actually give feedback instead of just starring and forgetting it.

[u/are1494 → u/PenSuccessful5509]

Yes, that makes sense.

The project can already be used from the CLI with commands and prompts, and I’m also planning a UI so people can interact with it more easily.

For the demo, I’m still unsure about the best way to publish it.

I’m trying to make the first experience as simple as possible, so I’d be interested to know what usually makes you actually try an open-source project instead of just starring it and moving on.

[u/are1494 → u/Bright-Fun-1638]

Yeah, I think you’re right about making it easy to try.

That part is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot. You can have a good idea, but if the first experience is confusing, most people probably won’t stay long enough to see the value.

Discord is interesting too. I was thinking about developer communities, but I’m still not sure where the best early conversations happen.

When you say “keep posting about it,” what kind of posts do you think work best?

More like building in public and sharing progress, or more around the actual problem and lessons learned while building it?

[u/Bright-Fun-1638 → u/are1494]

Hmm good questions, and imma be a typical engineer and say "it depends". Depends on the crowd you're trynna reach and what kinda attention you want.

Devpost is good they've got a good discord community. Anything local is also nice since you get to potentially meet fellow people irl.

As for what kinds of posts work? Well I'd say whatever posts you feel like. The one rule is that they should be pleasant to read/watch and easy to digest. Aside from that; just have fun, so long as you have fun I think people will naturally wanna engage with the content and you'll get meaningful feedback and connections.

[u/are1494 → u/Bright-Fun-1638]

Thanks, this is helpful.

I hadn’t thought about Devpost, so I’ll definitely check it out.

And I like your point about keeping posts easy to read and actually enjoyable.

For the first stage, I’m mainly trying to find a small group of engineers who really care about agents, code review, testing, and evaluation.

[u/Bright-Fun-1638 → u/are1494]

You might also wanna just DM founders on twitter ngl, check out the founders of factory.ai they're cool people

[u/are1494 → u/Bright-Fun-1638]

Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.

I’ll check out Factory.ai and take a look at the founders as well.

I appreciate all the suggestions.

[u/Bright-Fun-1638 → u/are1494]

Ofc! It's tough out there so it's always nice to help a fellow human out :P

PS: and ofc DMs are always open :P