April 21, 2026

[cassidyjames]

Our Coop working group meeting is tomorrow at 1530 UTC.

Agenda

• Check in on software development lifecycle (SDLC) checklist
• Adoption/developer experience
  • Publish Docker images #280
  • Always-online demo instance?
• Issue/PR triage follow-up; see project board

As always, please comment below to suggest anything for the agenda, or share in the Coop Discord channel and we can get it added.

[pawiecz]

Related to #280: I'd like to bring three long-term maintenance topics for discussion:

• Simplify "Getting started" process for newcomers #219 (also tangential to Always-online demo instance? #278)
• Check adopters' deployment processes and provide a reference setup #220
• Alleviate effort to process Dependabot updates by running automated integration tests in CI #221

I had a look at existing tasks and issues and gave a try at structuring them.

I'd love your feedback to nail down the challenges before thinking about potential solutions (I have some ideas, but I'm not particularly attached to any of them - I'd prefer to make sure we're all on the same page first).

[cassidyjames]

Notes

We opened with a brief informal check-in on “AI in open source coding”

• While capabilities are rapidly evolving, there hasn’t been as much adoption for direct code authoring in existing codebases/projects
• More often useful in testing and code review contexts
• Open questions around code licensing/copyright of LLM/agent-authored code

SDLC #213

Given the progress we’ve had on code simplification and vulnerability cleanup, #213 seems like the next big focus

• Keeps us honest
• Opens up easier contributing workflow: code quality standards, tests
• Re: tests, when doing cleanup to the codebase it’s been difficult to know if changes have negatively affected the experience, because we don’t have broad integration tests
  • If people want to experiment agentic/LLM/AI-assisted development, unit tests might be a place to do that
  • Related: [Coop] Juliet's OSS Testing Notes
  • Atproto for testing can be useful: open API, lots of data
  • Need to determine what tests; generally fewer tests to keep it from getting overcomplicated; test API paths
  • Can use integration tests to also take up-to-date screenshots for docs!
• Quality intent: still needs to be written

Demo instance #278

We’ve been asked if there is a demo instance for potential adopters to poke around to better understand Coop and its capabilities—and when attending events like FOSDEM and AtmosphereConf, a live demo instance was well-received by attendees.

• Pretty large undertaking: need to avoid abuse, resource usage…
• Does a demo server send the wrong message? I.e. we don’t serve hosted versions, so don’t focus on this—focus on developer onboarding and documentation
  • Make it easier to get running!
  • Video walkthrough can serve similar needs
• Could gate it behind authentication, have people apply to create a user for a demo instance
• Do we expect more interest in people getting hands-on to spin it up themselves, or people registering an account to poke around to see what Coop is/can do?
  • People interested in Coop should have some sense of what it is before they get started spinning it up
• Could talk to Musibi, who offers hosted Coop, to see if they could host a demo instance we could show to adopters?
• Even a “cheap” hosted instance is not just deploy-and-forget; has an added technical cost: keeping up with changing infra, deprecations, etc.

There’s still interest in keeping a demo instance in mind, but more immediate wins could be achieved by focusing on other forms of demo and onboarding content (docs and video walkthrough).

Actions

• @cassidyjames break Work through SDLC checklist P0s and P1s #213 into remaining sub-tasks
• @vinaysrao1 (and ROOSTers): design integration tests, file issue(s)
• ROOSTers: Intention statement #287
• @cassidyjames to push forward with Reworking Coop docs for 1.0 #228