AI Code Review Tutor for Emacs

Developers using AI lose learning opportunities because the AI just hands them solutions. Build an Emacs plugin that acts as a learning-focused pair programmer—it watches your code and suggests improvements/patterns without just writing it for you, helping you learn through guided struggle.

The broader tension between AI-assisted coding and genuine skill development is real and increasingly discussed among developers who worry they're outsourcing comprehension alongside keystrokes. Emacs is the sticking point here — it's a devoted but small audience, and building for it caps the addressable market hard before you've written a line of business logic; a VS Code or Neovim version would face more competition but serve orders of magnitude more users. At $500–2k/month, you're looking at maybe 20–80 paying subscribers at $25/month, which is achievable but leaves almost no room for paid acquisition, meaning this lives or dies on organic reach within a niche that's already niche. The most likely failure mode is that developers who care enough about learning to pay for a Socratic AI tutor are also the ones disciplined enough to configure existing tools — like custom system prompts in Aider or Cursor — to behave that way for free.