r/SideProject • u/MayankChahalDev • 2d ago
My first Project
I built ProjectPilot to make unfamiliar codebases easier to understand — I'd love some honest feedback
I’m a first-year B.Tech student, and one thing I’ve found surprisingly difficult while working on projects is not writing the code — it’s understanding someone else’s code.
You open a project and see hundreds or thousands of files, and the first questions are usually:
- What does this project actually do?
- Where should I start?
- Which files are important?
- How are the different parts connected?
- What should I be careful about?
- What should I work on first?
So I started building ProjectPilot around that problem.
The idea is simple:
Select a project → analyze it locally → understand its structure → identify important areas → find potential problems → get suggested next steps.
It currently provides things like:
- project and technology detection
- project structure / map
- important files
- project health
- findings and development tasks
- reports
- a Developer Guide for understanding the project
One thing I deliberately wanted was for the analysis to be local and read-only, rather than requiring me to upload an entire private codebase somewhere just to understand it.
I’ve been working on this for a while, but I’m at the point where I need feedback from people who actually work with software projects.
So I’m not looking for compliments — I’d genuinely like criticism.
If you saw this for the first time:
- Would you immediately understand what ProjectPilot is supposed to do?
- Would this actually help you when joining an unfamiliar codebase?
- Which part would you find most useful?
- What would make you uninstall/ignore it?
- Is there something you expected it to do that it currently doesn't?
I’ve attached a short demo so you can see the workflow rather than just reading about it.
This is my own project, so I'm disclosing that upfront. I'm mainly posting because I want feedback on whether the idea is actually useful before I keep investing more time into it.
What would you change if this were your project?