The story behind GitHits

GitHits started with a question in Slack.

By Olli-Pekka Heinisuo, GitHits Co-Founder and CTO

The question that started GitHits

When documentation didn’t explain something clearly, I had a simple fallback: search GitHub.

If a problem has been solved before, there is usually code somewhere showing how it works. Finding the right example still requires digging through files, issues, and discussions.

One day, Softlandia co-founder Mikko asked in Slack:

Who can find the definition for TranscribeDefinition?

He was building a transcription pipeline using Azure’s Speech SDK and couldn’t figure out how to initialize the object.

The official documentation didn’t show it yet, but the definition was already present in Microsoft’s GitHub repository inside documentation files prepared for a future release.

After finding it, I wrote in Slack:

GitHub search solves a surprising number of problems if the project is open source.

Then I added:

You could probably build a coding assistant that answers questions by searching GitHub with some heuristics.

That message started a discussion inside Softlandia Venture Studio. We decided to explore the idea, and Jaakko bought githits.com for $9.

Why GitHub search was not enough

Much of the practical knowledge about how libraries are used already exists in open-source repositories.

Developers have already recorded how libraries work in source code, documentation, issues, releases, and package metadata. The difficult part is finding the material for the package version or repository ref the agent is using.

Documentation can be incomplete, and raw search is noisy. Without the relevant source and package data, an agent may produce a plausible answer based on the wrong API or release.

Developers resolve these questions by inspecting source, reading documentation, checking package data, reviewing changes, and looking at how other projects solved similar problems. Doing that by hand works. Repeating it across dependencies, versions, and tasks is the problem GitHits was built to solve.

How GitHits gives agents context

GitHits is the code context layer for AI coding agents. It indexes open-source code, documentation, and package data by version, then exposes tools for code navigation, package inspection, vulnerability checks, changelog and upgrade review, and prior art.

Agents query these tools from the coding environments they already use, so they can inspect dependency evidence without cloning repositories or browsing from scratch.

Who it helps

Developers using AI coding tools

Engineers using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot when an unfamiliar dependency or undocumented API blocks the task.

Helping Claude Code find undocumented C++ APIs directly from the code.

— Onni Hakala, GitHits user

Developers working with specialized or fast-changing libraries

Engineers using packages whose documentation, examples, or APIs change faster than a model’s built-in knowledge.

I swapped my ritual of 20 browser tabs and stale Stack Overflow answers for a tool that actually understands what I’m trying to do.

— Atharv Singh, GitHits user

Meet the GitHits team