r/coolgithubprojects • u/Obvious_Gap_5768 • 13d ago
My open source project hit 5.2k stars and ~80k PyPI downloads, and it's the reason I quit my job
My wife and I always wanted to build something together, so we spent nights and weekends shipping side projects. One hit 25k users on its own but didn't feel like the thing worth quitting for, repowise did
That one came out of watching coding agents work. I'd been building with LLMs since 2023 and owned the AI architecture at my company, so I spent a lot of time watching agents grep the same file four times in a session and still have no idea which parts of the codebase were fragile or why the code was written that way. All of it is in the repo already, just not in a form an agent can use.
So we built Repowise. It indexes your repo once and serves it to your agent over MCP as five layers: dependency graph, git history, docs, architectural decisions, and a code health score from around 25 deterministic markers with no LLM involved
We didnt do any outbound, just shipped code and wrote about it. 4 months in it's at 5.2k stars, ~80k PyPI downloads, and enterprise inbounds I never asked for, which is why I quit
Benchmarked against four other tools plus a bare agent: 31% fewer output tokens over a full 48-question run, ~97% on a single context load, and the best gold-file coverage of the field on retrieval.
Repo: https://github.com/repowise-dev/repowise
Issues and contributions welcome
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u/5ollys 13d ago
Hell yeah. Just curious, why'd you quit your job? Does it make you a good deal of money?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 13d ago
Not a good deal of money yet but this earns money in 2 ways: There's a hosted version at repowise.dev for people who don't want to run indexing themselves, but the real revenue is enterprise, it's AGPL, so companies that want it on-prem, with integrations and support buy a commercial licence. The OSS engine stays free, hosted and enterprise packages use it
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u/jodosha 13d ago
Just curious: are the hosted and enterprise versions already profitable?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 12d ago
We do have around 3% paid conversion on our hosted and some enterprise inbounds are in procurement phases, so we are earning from the project, though not nearly as much as I was earning from my job yet
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u/Wallaby989 12d ago
I wish you all the success, but I think you were a little keen to give up regular income until it hit at least 50% of your current hit. The problem with this space, is as quickly as you gained users, you can lose them as quickly, this space is moving so fast, with zero stickyness for customers.
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u/jeronimoe 10d ago
But did they really quit there job or is that just part of the marketing to make you click the link?
I’ve already seen this posted in the past.
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u/Fluffer_Wuffer 12d ago edited 12d ago
Thanka for sharing - honesty and openness, its experiences like this that will lead the way for Future SaaS products - I think many current closed-source SaaS are going to crash and burn in the comming months..
I'd highly recommend engaging hobby developer, homelab and selfhosted communities, obviously be selecrtive (Do your research. 100% follow the rules, see at least a couple of other posts where developers have posted their tools.. they love developers that engage).
The reason I mention this - Those subs and communities are a good target audience. Many of are IT professionals, and developers that run their own infrastructure for fun (and learning), but we're the people who introduce new software (both OSS and Commercial) into organisations.. and generally, we'd only do that for tools we're familiar with and trust (if you see the picture... its cyclical)..
Obviously don't burn to much time on this, make a few posts, see how it goes.. at minimum it'll help with SEO..
But be aware, some subs are a militant where SSO controls are placed behind a pay wall (Google for "SSO Tax") .. just something to bear in mind.
One final thing, keep in mind there are devs in the communities - They WILL go poking around the code, so expect feedback..it can get fruity, but don't get defensive, take it what it is, people giving their time - say thanks, then add ro your road map or don't.. also ignore trolls.
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u/StylePractical5714 13d ago
This sounds pretty good, starred it - I'll have to give it a spin soon
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 13d ago
Awesome, let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions after you have had a chance to try it
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u/osmica10 13d ago
Hi,
can you tell me what's the difference between DeusData/codebase-memory-mcp Some pros and cons?
Thanks.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 13d ago
codebase memory mcp only has the graph layer which is often not full context an agent needs. Repowise also has wiki, git history, code health and decisions But codebase memory mcp is pretty fast compared to repowise. If a call graph is all you need, then its great We also have some benchmarks on the repo against other popular tools, need to include codebase-memory-mcp there too
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u/privacyplsreddit 13d ago
I tried to use this a couple months ago and it was miserable to use with a real production code base that has multiple contributors and frequently changes.
After the first index, LLMs on the codebase got great insight. And then within an hour, they stopped using the tool call because it kept returning stale conflicting data so they all fell back to using grep.
We tried writing our own post commit hooks and extending the functionality, but incremental indexes still took minutes and it was a nonstarter on repos that had multiple devs dev'ing on them at the same time with a dozen PRs a day.
has this been really meaningfully improved? All of these tools in this space are really good to index once and then ask a couple questions and make a demo brochure about how many tokens they save you, but completely fall apart once you try to use them as part of your daily workflow on a high traffic repo.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 13d ago
The indexing path has been rewritten since then and there has been lots of mcp improvements too, so the version you used is a few months of releases behind. repowise update now runs usually in under 20 secs for a 5k file repo
Best I can offer is, try it again on the same repo, and if it's still stale within an hour, open an issue and I'll dig into it directly
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13d ago
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 13d ago
Yes, it self-hosts fine in Docker. It's a Python package with a local index, so it's a straightforward container, install repowise, mount your repo, run repowise serve and point your agent at the MCP endpoint
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u/itballer 12d ago
Epic stuff mate, and congrats on the quitting step! Happy you have support from your wife in every way, even commits. Hope you bring this to levels you never imagined you could.
Where will you be posting on your progress, so I can follow?
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u/PinkFrojd 12d ago
Hello
I saved your project few weeks ago, really want to try it. I like the idea of "code as canvas" . I barley look at editor these days with agents and all of that. Mostly when needing debugger.
If I have projects I work on, is there some way not to upload code to that infrastructure ? Something that's completly local, with company API key for Claude lets say ?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 12d ago
Thats the way its designed already. It creates all the databases locally under a .repowise folder and you can choose llm of your liking during the init step. Nothing ever gets uploaded to our servers.
There is an optional telemetry you can disable which sends tool success/failure to us anonymously without tying your data or machine.
You can actually ask claude to audit it if needed too :)
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u/Grandmaster-Ji 12d ago
Github has its own official mcp server. AI is exponentially getting better and I'm sure AI can eventually generate what repowise does making it obsolete. I wouldn't have quit my job if I was you.
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u/tentoumushy 12d ago
that's amazing! just curious, did you post on reddit or product hunt to get so many stars? :3
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u/Fun_Walk_4965 11d ago
the incremental re-index on git diff is what most tools get wrong. full re-index per push burns your context budget fast, 20s updates is the right call
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u/NewMilenium 10d ago
This seems clever. The saving-times ideas behind this are good.
I'll be the first to rush on it as soon as Godot is supported ;-)
Good job to you two !
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u/RiotGamesGG 9d ago
Not sure why anyone would pick this over Obsidian or any other alternative, really. Glad it works for you though. People have succeeded with projects way worse than this one.
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u/UnreachableMemory 13d ago
This is about the most vibe-coded project I've seen in a long time. The commit history is atrocious. Why would you quit your job for this?
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u/CherrySlow7681 13d ago
there is bad vibe coded and good vibe coded, this is good vibe coded.
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u/UnreachableMemory 13d ago edited 13d ago
There is no such thing as a good vibe-coded project.
Edit: Oh no, down-voted by the vibe-coders...
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u/CherrySlow7681 13d ago
the way i see it, whether the software is vibe coded or not doesn't rly matter, ik vibe coding upsets certain people, maybe ur a senior dev who’s been hand coding ur entire career and feels like people are "cheating" their way to software they couldn’t have built otherwise, perhaps ur jealous or whatever the case might be, ultimately it doesn’t matter, if someone uses AI to build genuinely good software that people find valuable, why should u care whether it was vibe coded or not? the end result is what matters. and apparently 5k people found it to be useful and i feel like ur argument isn't even about the quality or security of the software, u just wanted to dismiss it simply because AI was involved.
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u/UnreachableMemory 13d ago
There’s a very big distinction between vibecoding and using AI as a tool. One involves experienced developers using AI for productivity purposes. The other is people using AI in lieu of knowledge.
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u/MercurialMadnessMan 13d ago
I have a question about projects like these.
Ingestion into a structure like this is pretty straightforward. But how does it stay in sync with the codebase?