FlowBase: AI Developer Onboarding

Understanding a new codebase is one of the most frustrating challenges in software engineering. New developers often face "Environment Chaos" trying to configure their local machines, waste days navigating undocumented "Dark Forests" of code, and constantly interrupt senior engineers just to understand basic business logic. Manual onboarding is slow, inefficient, and drains team velocity. Enter FlowBase: your automated AI Onboarding Engineer. FlowBase analyzes an entire codebase and transforms it into an interactive developer learning experience to help engineers understand and contribute to repositories faster. Core Features: Hierarchical Architecture Map: We eliminate endless file reading. FlowBase generates a fully interactive, visual node graph showing the exact execution flow and repository structure, allowing developers to visually navigate dependencies. Environment Doctor: Eliminating Day 1 setup friction. Our tool proactively scans package.json, Dockerfiles, and .env files to instantly detect missing configurations and generate foolproof setup commands. The Golden Path: A curated, AI-generated step-by-step roadmap that guides developers through the correct order of files to read to master the architecture. First Ticket Simulator: To bridge the gap from passive reading to active coding, FlowBase creates a safe sandbox with AI-generated, beginner-friendly tasks based on the actual repository's business logic so juniors can practice safely. The Tech Stack & AI Integration: Our intelligence layer is powered entirely by IBM Bob and IBM Granite. IBM Bob acts as our central brain—autonomously parsing the repository, mapping dependencies, diagnosing runtime issues, and writing the simulated engineering tasks. This is supported by a lightning-fast frontend using React, Vite, and React Flow (deployed on Vercel), and a Node.js/Express orchestration backend (deployed on Render). FlowBase turns confusion into contribution.