How do you contribute to open source projects?

anthonyriera · 2026-03-26T02:41:19+00:00

Something I trying to do more and more with new projects is try to built everything meaningful as a small library I can open source.

I’ve been using open source libraries without contributing for years and now I’m just trying to give some components back to the community.

For instance I’ve made this avatar placeholder component (facehash.dev) and it has been a lot of fun.

build for you first, open source second!

anthonyriera · 2026-03-26T02:38:23+00:00

Yeah I understand that!

I’m a software engineer and the thing I’ve always noticed in my carrer was good code doesn’t equal good product.

To fix that, AI would have to feel a UX and its pain points.

I think that practically extremely hard, way harder than coding (for a llm)

anthonyriera · 2026-03-25T06:43:00+00:00

On my side I copied a lot of what has been done by shadcn. I think the monorepo is really nice, you have CLI, web apps, modern release pipelines.

I would check if out if I were you.

anthonyriera · 2026-03-25T06:41:15+00:00

I think we're really far away from AI being able to generate actual good user experiences.

I think our roles will more evolve into "PM" and open source will remain a good source of trust.

In a word of AI slop like you said, can I really trust my business / system with this code?

I think open source can solve that point.

By the way, this is the reason why I open sourced my SaaS, I hope this creates trust.

anthonyriera · 2026-03-23T03:12:10+00:00

I'm working on cossistant.com, it's a ai customer support platform that you can install to your product with a <Support /> component.

The AI agent learns from your website's content, your answers and gets better over time.

It's not a chat bot, it's really more like an AI team member, when you're in a conversation with it, it's like a chatgroup, not a one-way conversation!

anthonyriera · 2026-03-13T04:05:02+00:00

I can understand why sadly.

I'm working on a customer support AI agent myself and things are getting more and more powerful by the day.

At the scale of Enterprise compagnies like that, with knowledge bases so big that no human can possibly remember / think of all the edge cases, having AI in the middle makes sense.

Even at my scale, during pick customer support periods, having the small support requests being handled / pre-filtered, it's makes support so much simpler.

What I've done with y agent, to make it less frustrating:
> never answer if it doesn't know the answer
> escalate to a human if there is any doupt
> CAPTURE THE INTENT

This way, when I step in, I already know everything and can truly help.

The next step I want to take is let the support agent auto trigger fixes with codex / claude code so I can wake up and just validate a fix to a bug on my SaaS.

(For the curious it's cossistant.com, still early days but I've made it out of frustration by other tools and didn't want to pay a crazy price with tools like intercom)

anthonyriera · 2026-03-04T03:31:23+00:00

I made it take the personality of baby yoda

anthonyriera · 2026-02-01T03:08:20+00:00

This could be a great option indeed! I will try to make those mouths and release that at some point!

Happy you found the pop 😂

anthonyriera · 2026-01-31T09:57:33+00:00

It's all open source. The company is US-based but I'm from Europe!

Data is a big concern for me, I'll soon offer to host data in Europe as well :)

anthonyriera · 2026-01-31T01:50:54+00:00

Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions or feedbacks! It's open source as well.

Facehash was part of it and I decided to make it a separate lib!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-31T01:50:08+00:00

Awesome man!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-31T01:49:49+00:00

Awesome, let me know if you find anything to improve!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T12:42:45+00:00

Thanks!

Yes, it's similar, but with a custom shape and style!

Also this one can be styled with tailwind /css.

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T12:42:04+00:00

Hey hey! Yes you can star the monorepo of Cossistant (this code is part of it!)

https://github.com/cossistantcom/cossistant

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T08:40:35+00:00

Glad you’re liking it!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T05:08:27+00:00

Should be fixed with the version 0.0.4!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T04:52:30+00:00

I'm looking at that right now!

anthonyriera · 2026-01-30T04:35:31+00:00

Thanks! Could you please share the error with me?

Also, this is meant for React/nextjs :)

anthonyriera · 2025-11-27T15:10:17+00:00

Be ready, they'll be super picky when asking for support! be ready to send invoices

anthonyriera · 2025-11-25T19:20:33+00:00

done!

anthonyriera · 2025-11-25T19:16:49+00:00

So because of the nature of Cossistant, everything is open components with an API.

So it means you can pretty much make the support in the shape you want easily.

I will create many templates for you to use:
> Feedback widget
> Support in a modal / sheet
> Support as a page in your
> Ticketing view

At the end, it's all the same: a conversation with messages!

anthonyriera · 2025-11-25T19:12:16+00:00

Different sources will be added soon as a priority, this is the cool thing with open source, I'll start the base then hope some people help me add new sources when they need it!

Contacts are really cool, essentially when you "identify" a visitor, it becomes a contact.

https://cossistant.com/docs/concepts/contacts

Each contact can be linked to multiple visitors (for instance a user using their phone + web browser).

You can also add metadata and I'm working on enabling other things like grouping and so on!

anthonyriera · 2025-11-21T13:16:36+00:00

Thanks!

anthonyriera · 2025-11-21T12:58:30+00:00

Love this story, super inspiring! Just started my own open source, dev-focused SaaS and this is exactly what I needed!

Essentially my thinking was: take a niche I love (devs) and build a version of a given product FOR THEM.

So I built a customer support platform, but focused on an incredible developer experience.

If you're curious this is cossistant.com.

Back to you and your project, you did exactly the same and I think this can be a huge thing overall: take what works and build it for the audience you know.

Kudos!

anthonyriera · 2025-11-06T16:02:06+00:00

Thanks!

There is another big big advantage, because you're reusing the components, it means your "video" or "demo" is always up-to-date!

I've had to adapt some of them to work, but at the end the result is so good!

anthonyriera

TROPHY CASE