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Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

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11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

#11
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.

Re: Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

#12

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?

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.

Re: Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

#13

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.

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.

Re: Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

#16
> 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.

Re: Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs

#17

> 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.

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.
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