I'm a novice coder too, but a good code groomer and doc writer :) The people who are good coders often aren't great at HOWTOs and technical writing. With code moving this quickly, I don't know that it does make sense for them to pause and onboard coders. Does it make sense for long term code building? Yes, but often other, external projects, like @jesta's stuff, is what actually makes it easier for others to build.

Happy to collab on something, I think there was some open source bots already that we can likely extend.

Have you tried steempress? We really need people to just try it. Maybe you and I can actually run a steemit-hunt instance, what do you think?