Make your first commit with Archie AI

One universal way to measure success in onboarding is making your first commit. Even if it’s not a successful commit, the act of changing the code, playing with it … is an effective way to understand it.

While you still have ground to cover, you added a new logic, understood dependency, setup dev environment … that’s something. For a typical developer in large firms, it can take 8–10 weeks to make their first commit. We aim to reduce that to a few hours with this launch!

This feature has been in the works since day one and now we’re ready to share with you.

How can you make your first commit with Archie AI?

It’s a simple four step process.

First, pick a github issue. Likely one marked good for first use. Or work on customer features by selecting “write your own purpose”.

Second, drop in a few files and functions using our repo search function that this feature touches and will be useful for planning. We also offer a smart select option. One way to make this selection better is to use our code Q&A, summarization, file structure and other features to understand what files are critical for this code base.

Third, we use the context provided in step 2 to generate a plan. Treat this as your feature design or planning docs. Make sure to keep it short and preces. Feel free to go back to step and regenerate if you want to add or remove certain files or functions.

Fourth, in this step, once the plan is read, we generate code, which is a multi-file edit. Now you can either copy this code in the editor of choice or just click commit. The commit creates a new branch (that we ask you to name) and makes a commit on this one.

Next, you can merge and refine the code.

In our testing, this has been great in creating code skelton and getting 70–80% of the task done. Sometimes it might require a few iterations. Then comes our role as developer to write test cases, refine the code, and make sure it’s well integrated within the codebase :)

We’re excited to hear what you make happen with this new feature!

Happy coding :)

Ps: Here is a video walkthrough of how I used this feature to make a commit to a new codebase I stumbled upon.