It will help you improve your skills and understand how to start this journey!
Over the past months, I’ve increasingly integrated AI into my daily workflow, allowing me to tackle projects and tasks that were previously out of reach due to time or resource constraints.
This shift has been transformative, enabling me to contribute more effectively to open-source software (OSS) and even address long-standing personal challenges—like improving the professionalism of my work emails.
AI-Assisted Open-Source Contributions
One of the most exciting aspects of using AI is its ability to help me contribute to projects in languages or domains where I’m not an expert. For example:
- KFind (KDE): I submitted a merge request to improve KFind, a KDE utility written in C++. While I’m not a C++ expert, AI helped me draft and refine the code, which I then carefully reviewed and tested. This ensured that the final submission was both functional and maintainable, without burdening the project’s reviewers with low-quality code.
- ILSManager (Italian Linux Society): I added over 100 unit tests to ILSManager, a CRM tool used by the Italian Linux Society. The project had long lacked comprehensive testing, and AI helped me generate test cases efficiently. Again, thorough review and manual testing were crucial to ensuring the tests were meaningful and reliable.
It is important that contributing with AI to do our part as developer and review what they do before asking to a project maintainer to do that for us.
Say goodbye to sloppy human emails!
I decided to create a Thunderbird extension that analyzes outgoing emails for professionalism before they’re sent. Here’s how it works:
- Configuration: Users set up their email accounts in Thunderbird and configure the extension to monitor specific addresses.
- AI Analysis: The extension uses an AI model (via Regolo.AI, a European, privacy-focused inference provider) to analyze the email’s tone, clarity, and professionalism.
- Blocking and Feedback: If the email doesn’t meet the professionalism threshold, the extension blocks it and provides feedback on how to improve it.
Why Regolo.AI?
Privacy was a top concern. Regolo.AI is a European provider, so I can trust that my email content isn’t being used to train third-party models or shared with other companies.
PS: I used Regolo.AI itself to build this extension in few days of carefully code review and testing.
You can find the extension:
