[lazaroclapp]

Hi, everyone! We are some of the authors behind Uber’s OSS developer tools, which have appeared in HN previously, including: Piranha (automated stale flag cleanup and code refactoring), NullAway/NilAway (NPE/nil panic static detection), OkBuck, etc.

While we think all those tools are great (they are not going away and there are hopefully more to come both from us and from the team remaining at Uber!), we believe that the main thing a developer platform team brings to a company is an integrated experience. We started Gitar to provide that same experience across multiple companies, including those which do not (yet) have a large developer platform team!

We have plenty of ideas (starting with some interesting tooling around code refactoring!), but also happy to hear about the challenges you all see at various scale companies related to developer experience and tooling.

[sqs]

Congrats on founding a company here!

[xmonkee]

But what is it? An IDE?

[lazaroclapp]

Well, an IDE is not fundamentally out of scope, but for the foreseeable future the plan there is more along the lines of plugins for common IDEs (e.g. VSCode, Jetbrains) and integrations with existing code review and code hosting services (GitHub, GitLab, etc.).

We want to integrate with a few reasonable permutations of a development environment and overlay stuff like dead code deletion and refactoring (Already got a tool for that! More to come soon, but that's not the full business for us, just the first feature), static analysis (see NullAway/NilAway for examples that go beyond basic linting), tools for managing compatibility between dependencies and fixing flaky tests, and LLM-based code transformation and code review tools. At some point or another we have talked about how we'd rebuild each and every step of the development process (up to including version control), but for now there are easier and more urgent problems we think we can solve than that or building a new IDE :)