Exercism spawns a nipicking robot

Katrina Owens and our friends at Exercism — an app that lets you practice your coding and get crowd-sourced mentorship (listen to #108 for the back story) — have recently added a new nitpicker to the mix.

Meet Rikki: a friendly neighborhood nitpicking robot.

Rikki is based on Jacob Richardson's Codeminer. Its comments are also open source and live in good ole' Markdown files so anybody can help contribute. Rikki has a pretty limited set of responses right now, but if the experiment goes well, it can easily expand its vocabulary.

Concerned that a robot will take over the valuable discussions that have made Exercism so great? Fear not:

Rikki's feedback is not intended to replace the discussions with other developers. It's just a way to provide a tiny bit of quick feedback before the humans get involved.