product
Primary — the new developer on Day 1. Someone dropped into an unfamiliar codebase: a new hire, an open-source contributor, a consultant. Their context is impatient and exploratory — they're at a terminal or a browser, trying to answer "where do I start, how do I run this, what's safe to touch?" without waiting days for a senior dev to explain. They want signal, not a wall of outdated docs.
Secondary — maintainers and team leads. OSS maintainers and engineering leads who want to generate or refresh onboarding material for their own repos so newcomers ramp faster. Their job is to lower the cost of contribution.
The web surface specifically serves an evaluator: someone trying the tool without installing the CLI. They paste a repository URL, watch streamed progress, and skim the generated files. The web UI is a fast, trustworthy demo of what the CLI delivers — not a marketing site.
Repo Bootcamp turns any public GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repository into a Day-1 onboarding kit in under 60 seconds. It uses the GitHub Copilot SDK's agentic capabilities — Claude autonomously explores the codebase with file/search tools rather than dumping context — to produce 14+ interconnected, schema-validated markdown documents (overview, onboarding, architecture, codemap, first tasks, runbook, dependencies, security, tech radar, metrics, health) plus security and onboarding-risk scoring and Mermaid diagrams.
Success looks like a newcomer going from "I'm lost" to a productive first contribution without consuming a senior engineer's week. The project doubles as a flagship showcase of the Copilot SDK for building agentic developer tools.
Three words: fast, confident, developer-native.
The voice is direct and benefit-first, with a dry, lightly irreverent edge ("Stop wasting time on manual onboarding docs. Let AI do the heavy lifting."). Credibility is earned through evidence, not adjectives — 1,270+ tests, Zod-validated output, sub-60-second generation. The heritage is the terminal: ASCII banners, CLI-first ergonomics, precise output. Emotionally, the interface should make onboarding feel effortless and a little exciting instead of tedious, and it should radiate competence so a developer trusts the results immediately.
- The generic "AI dark-mode dev tool" look the current web demo embodies: a navy-gradient background, neon cyan→green gradient text and buttons, and muted gray body copy. This is the saturated 2026 AI default and the single thing to move away from — it makes a genuinely capable tool read as a weekend template.
- Gradient text headings (
background-clip: text). A shared absolute ban; never meaningful. - Heavyweight enterprise doc portals (Confluence / SharePoint wikis): slow, bureaucratic, perpetually stale. Repo Bootcamp is their opposite — instant and regenerable.
- Over-animated, pitch-deck SaaS landing pages. This is a tool, not a funnel. The web surface stays task-focused; no orchestrated scroll choreography or hero-metric templates.
- Speed is the product. The interface must feel as fast as the sub-60-second promise. Never make the user wait on decoration or choreography; motion only ever conveys state.
- Show the work. Stream real progress, show real scores, list real files. Trust is earned by being transparent about what the agent is doing, not by hiding it behind a spinner.
- Terminal-native credibility. Honor the CLI heritage. The web surface should feel built by people who live in the terminal — precise, unfussy, monospace where code and data belong.
- Signal over noise. Like the docs it generates, the UI surfaces what matters (status, scores, files) and lets nothing decorative compete for attention.
- Familiar, not strange. It's a developer tool. Lean on conventions developers already trust — standard form controls, clear interactive states, obvious affordances — and save surprise for earned moments.
Target WCAG 2.1 AA. The existing web template already does some things right — sr-only labels, aria-live progress regions, a proper role="dialog" modal with Escape-to-close — and that baseline must be preserved and extended.
Known debts to fix: muted gray (#888) subtitle and label text on the dark background fails AA; body and placeholder text must reach ≥4.5:1 and large text ≥3:1. Every interactive control needs a visible focus ring and full keyboard operability, and the modal needs proper focus trapping/restoration. All progress and transition motion must honor prefers-reduced-motion with a non-animated fallback.