Archive Backed by Y Combinator · Open source

Your team's engineering standards, surfaced as you type, checked before review, and shipped in every PR.

Every team has a way of doing things — and most of it lives in people's heads, in review comments, in a CONTRIBUTING.md nobody reads. Quack turned those expectations into structured guidelines and served them back inside the editor, exactly where the code gets written.

Read the extension source See how it worked

Apache 2.0 · self-hostable · runs on local LLMs

api/routes/users.py
14async def create_user(payload):
15    # TODO: validate
16    user = db.insert(payload)
17    return user
18
QUACK COMPANION
TEAM GUIDELINES · 2 ISSUES
▲DB writes must go through a transaction context.
▲Validate payloads with a Pydantic model, not inline.
✓Type hints on every public function.
Fix with local model
HOW IT WORKED

A loop between the people who set the bar and the people who ship

Guidelines were never a document. They were a living index that the IDE could query, the model could reason over, and maintainers could measure.

01

Curation

Maintainers wrote their expectations once — naming, error handling, testing, review etiquette. Quack parsed existing docs and past PR comments to bootstrap the list.

02

Assistance

The extension pulled only the guidelines relevant to the file you had open, checked your diff against them, and generated compliant code — before a reviewer ever saw it.

03

Iteration

Which rules got broken most? Which ones nobody understood? Maintainers saw where the contribution flow leaked, and rewrote the guidelines that weren't landing.

YOUR CODE STAYED YOURS

Built on open models, not someone else's cloud

Quack ran against Ollama and any OSS model you pointed it at. Self-host the whole stack, keep every line of source on your own infrastructure.

Ollama Llama 3 Mistral CodeQwen Phi-3 FastAPI + Postgres
STILL ONLINE

The product is sunsetted. The code isn't.

Everything we built is Apache 2.0 on GitHub — fork it, run it, take the parts you need.

Browse the organisation →
companion Python

The API — guideline storage, retrieval and LLM orchestration over Ollama.
companion-vscode TypeScript

The editor extension that surfaced guidelines and checks inline.
platform TypeScript

The web app maintainers used to curate and review their guidelines.
BACKED BY Entrepreneur First Y Combinator Agoranov

New problem, same team

Quack AI is no longer maintained. After a stint on SourcePulse, the founders left developer tooling behind and now build Rimward, security monitoring for solar sites.

Visit rimward.ai →