[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) - Automatic updates f...
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Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) - Automatic updates for customer-
facing docs
Hi HN! I'm Prithvi, and my co-founder Frances and I built
Promptless (https://gopromptless.ai), an AI teammate that
proactively updates docs while you ship software. There's a demo
video at https://youtu.be/pmslSl8dOgE, and also a "Live Demo on
Your Own Docs" at https://gopromptless.ai/demo where you can plug
in the URL to any existing docs site and simulate a "trigger event"
to see what Promptless would have suggested. We also opened up the
full product with automatic triggers for a free trial for HN this
week (if you sign up at https://gopromptless.ai/hn). We built
Promptless because we wished we had it, both as doc authors and doc
consumers. On the authoring side, I used to run engineering at a
fintech company, and since no developer enjoys updating docs, they
often went out-of-date and customers complained. On the consuming
side, when we write code, we regularly run into mistakes or
omissions in vendors' or dependencies' docs that slow us down.
(This pain seems to be getting more acute with AI coding
assistants, since they often rely blindly on docs.) Promptless can
be automatically triggered from new PRs or support tickets, or by
manually tagging @Promptless in Slack. It integrates via OAuth with
tools like Jira, Linear, and Notion, so that it has context about
the intent of each change or feature. It drafts new or updated docs
and can push them up to wherever docs live, like Readme, Mintlify,
Intercom, Zendesk, or a Github repo. How it works: when first
connected to your docs, it starts by reviewing each page and
building a "product ontology" that understands concepts, entities,
and resources, as well as the relationship between them. This can
take several minutes to an hour depending on the number of
articles. Then, when a new trigger event occurs (such as a new PR),
the Promptless agent initializes a session with several tools to
find relevant context and draft new or updated documentation. We
expected early users to be most excited about automatically
updating docs from new PRs, but we were surprised by other use
cases from customers. For example, one has a ton of Slack Connect
channels with customers, and our killer feature for them is being
able to trigger an update from Slack in one click from Slack.
Another has a content team separate from their product team, so for
them, being able to update guides when the product team publishes
release notes every two weeks is really valuable. Others value
Promptless because it makes their AI support agents (like
Intercom's Fin AI) perform better, since it makes the source
material more accurate and complete. We have also published
updates for several open-source projects (like Ansible, Prefect,
Ray, and Ollama). Some projects have >40% of recent commits being
doc updates/corrections, so having a product like Promptless that
automatically suggests those doc updates can make contributing a
lot easier and improve the DevEx for end-users. We'd love for you
to check us out, and we welcome any suggestions, requests,
questions, or criticism! Thank you for reading!
Author : prithvi2206
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-02-18 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
| smashah wrote:
| As a solo-maintainer of an open source project who begs the
| community (to no avail) to submit PRs for the docs from their
| perspective, this project is definitely something I would use. I
| will give it a test drive over the next few days. Don't want to
| sound like a freeloader but are you planning on offering some
| sort of concessions/discounts for OSS projects? Maybe we can
| configure it with our own keys to take some cost off of you for
| our projects?
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Hey! We absolutely love to support open-source projects. Happy
| to chat with you to make sure that we can work within your
| budget as a solo maintainer.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. This looks great. I could see this being
| useful for internal documentation at larger companies too
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Totally, that's part of the plan! Unsurprisingly, people are
| willing to invest more in customer-facing docs, but we're
| already some people using Promptless for "internal clients",
| where you have, say, a platform/data team that's publishing
| docs for other teams at a larger company.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Can it be attached to Discord? One of the most annoying things I
| find is the loss of precious info in there. Even when channels
| are not removed or entire servers disappear, the search is so bad
| that no one (...) bothers and just re-asks.
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Exactly the right use-case. Discord has been requested a couple
| of times, and is coming soon! Happy to reach out when it's
| available.
| iknownthing wrote:
| I'm curious, does it get triggered when a PR is opened or when it
| is merged? Because if it is when it is opened, updates to the PR
| could still get made which I assume would cause updates to the
| doc changes. Also, what if 2 PRs are opened at the same time?
| What if a PR is opened but never merged?
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Great questions! It is possible to get Promptless to run only
| when PRs are merged, or when commits are made on `main`, but
| pretty much everyone wants the doc updates to be drafted when
| PRs are opened, because they'd like to review the doc updates
| in parallel (i.e. before it's actually released). If two PRs
| are created at the same time, Promptless will review them
| separately (and potentially create two docs PRs, if both have
| customer-facing impact).
|
| Honestly, some of these workflow points are areas that we're
| probably going to adjust and add more configuration around. For
| example, some folks with very high commit velocity are asking
| for a "daily digest" docs PR from Promptless instead of
| individual docs PRs.
| skylerwiernik wrote:
| Looks cool! Super minor note -- your footer still says (c) 2024
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Oops. Fixed. Thank you!
| ngalstyan4 wrote:
| This is really cool, congrats on launch!
|
| I am curious how you prevent private data from getting leaked to
| the auto-generated public docs. I imagine this problem does not
| exist in open source projects, but would become an issue if not
| everything discussed in company's private messenger should be
| used as context for generating docs.
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Absolutely. There are steps in Promptless's agent flow that are
| designed to prevent this, but this is why users still review
| Promptless's suggestions to guides before committing/publishing
| them. I think people will still want to review Promptless's
| suggestions for a while, but the granularity of oversight will
| probably decrease as trust increases.
| paulgb wrote:
| This looks great, can't wait to try it out!
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Awesome!
| nextworddev wrote:
| What's the use case?
| aqueueaqueue wrote:
| > no developer enjoys updating docs
|
| I must be weird ;)
|
| I would be OK with AI doing it as long as it is more like
| dependabot and asks for a PR like everyone else.
|
| Untruths is the biggest issue but then docs mislead anyway due to
| getting out of date.
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Ha, I might also be weird. But yes it just opens PRs for doc
| updates, which still need to be reviewed. Maybe eventually
| people will want Promptless to be committing doc updates
| directly, but I still think human oversight is important for
| high-quality docs, both to prevent untruths but also to guide
| good information architecture.
| hahnbee wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Would love to chat sometime on getting a
| Mintlify integration going.
| prithvi2206 wrote:
| Thanks! Some of our early customers use Mintlify (we're big
| fans), which is an easy integration since there's always a
| Github sync. Let's chat soon!
| bravura wrote:
| Aside, but what do you recommend for internal docs? Particularly
| if your internal docs are all Markdown?
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(page generated 2025-02-18 23:00 UTC)