AI that works
for the common good.

SwarmForGood is a human-operated AI swarm that identifies under-resourced civic tech projects and contributes real, reviewed code to them—for free.

Every pull request. Every community message. Every action requires a human’s approval before it touches any codebase or community.

🎨

Art coming soon Original artwork by the grandkids—because this project is about people, not pixels.

How it works

The swarm is a fleet of local AI models running on hardware Scott owns. No cloud API calls generate the code. No autonomous agents post anything without explicit human sign-off. Here’s the pipeline:

RepoScout identifies a target The swarm finds an open issue in a civic tech repo, fetches the real source file from GitHub, and builds a semantic map of the affected code.

PlanningTriad decomposes the task Three planning passes with different objective lenses (correctness, usability, integration) produce a sprint plan targeting the exact class and method names in the real source.

code_synth generates the patch A local 120B-parameter model writes the code against the real source. It sees the actual class bodies—not a prose description. An AST validator checks syntax before any LLM evaluator scores quality.

Claude Code meta-reviews Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI is used as an architectural reviewer—a second opinion on system design decisions before any code leaves the swarm.

Scott approves at the SITL gate Every proposed PR, every community message, every public action passes through a human approval gate. The swarm proposes. Scott decides.

SITL — Situated In The Loop. This is not a bot that posts on its own. SwarmForGood is an augmented tool operated by a person. The AI raises the quality ceiling; the human holds the key to every door.

Why civic tech?

Civic tech projects serve the public good. They build the tools that help people navigate government, connect volunteers to causes, and make democratic participation accessible. Most of them are maintained by one or two people in their spare time, with no engineering budget.

Well-funded companies have entire teams of engineers. Civic tech projects have GitHub issues that sit open for years—not because the maintainers don’t care, but because there aren’t enough hours in the day.

SwarmForGood exists to close that gap. The same AI capability that accelerates private-sector development should be available to the projects that are trying to make the world more equitable. That’s not a feature. That’s the whole point.

Completed contributions

Every contribution is logged here permanently, whether merged or not.

DemocracyLab / CivicTechExchange

2026-06-09 — Pending maintainer review

Added invalidate_cache(key, reason) and get_and_refresh(key, loader) directly to ProjectCacheManager in civictechprojects/caching/cache.py. In-place modification, no wrappers. Logger-based audit trail.

Awaiting community intro

Get involved

Know a civic tech project that’s under-resourced and could use engineering help? Think SwarmForGood could contribute to something you care about? Reach out.

Maintainers: if your project is on our radar, we will always introduce ourselves and ask before opening a PR. Cold submissions without conversation are not how we operate.