Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs
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side, I used to run engineering at a fintech company, and since no developer enjoys updating docs, they often went out-of-date and customers complained.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!
61 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHonestly, 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.
If you're asking if Promptless should just add doc updates to the same PR as the code PR, that's definitely an option, but people tend to just want them separate both because it fits better with their workflows and it's less contingent on CI/CD processes, if that makes sense.
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.
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.
Another pain point was creating guides/examples for integrating 3rd party tools. Could be worth exploring
In terms of creating guides/examples for third-party tools, do you have a particular use-case in mind? e.g. if you're something like Zapier with hundreds of connections?
For example, a guide to integrate Shopify's Storefront API with Sanity CMS. These are usually a marketing/product thing more than developer docs... and almost always become obsolete after the next release and forgotten about.
Would've loved to generate a bunch of these guides and then automatically keep them up-to-date with code examples, and help serve both purposes for growth and developer docs.
Definitely would love to pick your brain more about this if interested. prithvi@gopromptless.ai
We'll definitely be posting some case studies in the coming weeks, though!
So far, there is at most a few months' gap between state-of-the-art and commodity, if for no other reason than that other companies train on the output of the SOTA.
If I were a VC, I would invest in a wrapper (Cursor, Harvey, this idea, etc.) over a foundation model every day of the week.
* This could revolutionize how we manage information.
* Think of the time saved, no more manual updates.
* Customer satisfaction would likely increase.
* Accuracy in documentation becomes a focus.
Could this be the end of outdated manuals?
They may be rare, but this is not universally true! I have a staff developer who creates beautiful documentation, paired with hand drawn (tablet) diagrams. I never miss an opportunity to complement & thank him for his work, he really seems to enjoy it and it goes well with the role's mandate to level-up other developers. If you find a developer (especially a senior+) who likes to create and maintain documentation, treat them like gold!
But for our standard use-case, the number of docs pages (crude proxy for documentation surface area) ends up being the primary metric separating pricing tiers. We're in the process of standardizing a startup tier that probably fits most docs sites that are ~100 pages or fewer and <20 employees.
However, you all should publish pricing before launching, and forcing me to book a call with you to use it is a nonstarter for me.
I don't want to get tied to this tool and then be charged for it in some weird way; give me your v0 pricing so that I can pay for it in a transparent way. As a fellow founder, I think you also know how little time I have for calls to check out demos for tools. So, just let me sign up and give it a spin.
Happy to get you set up on either!
That could be tied up with product walkthroughs so applications would give you a demo on its own and would be always up to date.
Sort of a primitive version of this, but one Promptless user is using it to update in-app tutorials for various integrations they have, in addition to public docs. The tutorials in this case are just text, but there's a path from having that context to actually having an in-app agent that provides a product walkthrough tailored for the logged-in user's unique use-case.
Can you clarify the slack integration? I see you've mentioned it, but I'm unclear on the workflow.
A use-case I've thought about previously is support discussions we have on our slack channel, which indicate that we need to update our docs.
Is Promptless able to raise a PR with suggested updates on docs, based on question/answers in our support channels?
Here's a video we made a month or so ago that shows how (1) works, hope that helps! https://www.tella.tv/video/cm5x8uj9f001d0al11vyxcnsc/view