Ask HN: Feedback on idea- a knowledge bot for Dev Teams

Looking for feedback on this idea i’m working on: a knowledge bot for dev/engineering teams.

The idea is there is org-specific developer-related knowledge spread across various machines/apps (wiki pages, github, box, etc.) and you want to quickly get specific knowledge relevant to you right away. For example, if i'm trying to connect to my local database and need db connection info, i would pop my cli and type: `bot whats our app connection info for the postgres db?’ and the bot will return relevant org-dev specific knowledge.

Think of it as your team’s collective knowledge (thats spread across a plethora of cloud and local apps/machines) suddenly accessible via the cli. No need to login to a separate app and sift through various pages to find what you need. The data comes to you.

Any devs that work in a team think this is useful? Would you pay for such a tool? How often do you find yourself having such a problem- if you can describe the problem too please.

4 comments

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nwrk 10y ago ↗

Just curious, why do you prefer bot against other types of UI ?

edit - example of tools solving similar problem:

https://kite.com/

https://kapeli.com/dash

infinitone 10y ago ↗

Dash and Kite are mainly for code documentation/info.

What i'm thinking is more about your team's specific info- such as:

- what is the postgres db connection info

- how to setup remote debugging environment

- give me our test machine information

- fetch the latest styleguide doc

- what is our security guide on sensitive info

- how to build x (where x is a product our team works on) on linux/windows

cauterized 10y ago ↗

I could see that being useful in slack. Especially if you could "cc @bot" when answering a teammate's question to add an item to be knowledge base and it had strong NLP to handle different phrasings of both input and question.

I'd probably need to trial it for proof of usefulness before paying anything more than about $25/yr total for it, and that may put you in a bind as the developer - since (for a team the size of mine) you'd need at least a 6-month trial just to populate the knowledge base with enough items to be useful and then a couple more months for using it to become reflex.

sharemywin 10y ago ↗

I always want to type a library or function in and get example code. be interesting to have it connected to scripts. like "is x123 server up?" runs a script gets an answer.