About Us

I'm sharing how I got the idea for GitHits, why we decided to build it, and who it is for.

By Olli-Pekka Heinisuo, GitHits Co-Founder and CTO
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The GitHits Origin Story: Where the Idea Came From

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. GitHub search often surfaces it, but finding the right example still requires digging through files, issues, and discussions.

One day, Softlandia’s 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, and we decided to explore the idea. Jaakko also managed to buy githits.com for $9.

Why We Built GitHits

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

Across millions of repositories, developers have already solved integration problems, handled edge cases, and figured out how libraries behave in practice. The difficulty is locating the relevant implementation.

Documentation is often incomplete. Search returns raw results. AI coding agents generate plausible answers but struggle with unfamiliar libraries and long-tail edge cases.

Developers usually resolve these situations by looking at how the problem was implemented in existing repositories.

We believe AI coding agents should be able to learn from those implementations the same way developers do.

GitHits distills those examples into a single implementation pattern that agents and developers can use directly.

Over time, this creates a map of how software is actually built across the open-source ecosystem.

How GitHits Finds the Implementation

GitHits searches open-source repositories and distills implementation patterns from existing code.

Instead of returning a long list of search results, it analyzes code, issues, and repository context to produce a single example relevant to the problem being investigated.

This gives developers and AI coding agents a concrete starting point based on how similar problems were solved in open source.

Who It Helps

GitHits is primarily used by:

1. Developers using AI coding tools

Engineers working with tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot who encounter problems that models cannot resolve.

"Helping Claude Code find undocumented C++ APIs directly from the code." - Onni Hakala, GitHits user

2. Developers working on ecosystems where AI is less reliable

Engineers building in languages like Go, Rust, Kotlin, or C++, where documentation is thinner, and training data coverage is weaker.

"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

Introductions

Olli-Pekka Heinisuo: Co‑founder, Chief Technology Officer

I created the opencv-python package. It has over 1B downloads. I wanted to keep contributing to the open source ecosystem.

Now I'm building GitHits search agents and the reasoning layer.

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Juha Litola: Co‑Founder, Chief Architect

I thought I was done with startups, but I realized the AI coding revolution is just too big an opportunity to miss.

I'm responsible for building the code indexing and intelligence engine that understands dependencies.

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Nathan Burg: Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer

I was one of the first people to test Olli-Pekka's first prototype. I tried something hard: writing a CUDA kernel.

Every other AI tool produced code that wouldn't compile. GitHits passed my tests on the first try. I wanted to join the team.

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Jaakko "Jack" Timonen: Co-Founder, CEO

After bankrupting my first startup, I was on the hunt to find an idea I'd be excited about.

When Olli-Pekka pitched "a coding problem solver using GitHub search with smart heuristics", I was immediately hooked.

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Eze Jaime: Product Designer

20+ years shipping digital products across retail, fintech, and entertainment, used by millions.

Joined GitHits after experiencing the frustration of AI giving answers that look right but don't actually work. Now I'm fixing that through design.

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Tayyab Rasheed: GTM Engineer

Built AI/LLM automation across multiple production systems - OpenAI, Gemini, Vertex. Awarded for rapid technical growth, strong ownership of complex systems, and continuous skills improvement at Mavric.

Now building the GitHits GTM engine.

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Stop wasting tokens and Get Rid of Loops.

Join the GitHits private beta and ground your AI coding agent in real-world implementation patterns from open source.