How to find impactful issues in large open-source codebases: pick a subsystem first
Abhishekcur · x · 2026-10-25
Abhishekcur shares his personal method for surfacing good, impactful issues in large open-source codebases.
- Instead of hunting issues repo-wide, pick one subsystem, play with it by changing variables, and observe what unknown problems (often performance ones) emerge
- Adopt the mindset of owning one thing rather than everything — even maintainers of big systems have their own areas of expertise
- If no existing issue covers it, just open one yourself: that's how engineers work on big production codebases
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