What It Looks Like When Your Docs Keep Up With Your Product
What does it look like when your docs keep up with your product, without you spending half your day hunting for what changed?
Most docs tools solve distribution. They give you a nice site, interactive API explorers, maybe a search bar that works. That’s real value, but it assumes the hard part is presentation. The actual hard part is knowing what needs to be written and keeping it honest as the product moves underneath you. That is the work that eats your week, and that is the problem we built Promptless to solve.
We have been working with teams like Helm, Vitess, Basis, and Vellum over the past few months, and there are three workflows that keep surprising me with how much they change the shape of a writer’s day.
The first is just eliminating the classic “I didn’t know that changed” problem. Many of our customers love the awareness Promptless gives them of what changed, and how it changed. Promptless watches every PR across their repos, and when an engineer changes how auth works or deprecates a parameter, the tech writer does not find out from a support ticket three weeks later. A writer gets a drafted update with citations back to the PR, the relevant Slack discussion, the engineer’s own description of the change. Review it, ask Promptless for changes, manually edit it, published. The feedback loop between code change and doc update collapses to hours.
The second is something Basis is doing that (completely unexpected to me)! They dump their customer call transcripts into a Git repository, and Promptless monitors that repo and maintains internal documentation around what all their customers are doing, what they are asking about, what keeps coming up, how the product is actually being used out in the field. An internal knowledge base that builds itself from conversations, and because it lives in their own repo in a format they control, they are building all kinds of internal agents to make use of it. They would get way less value from throwing all that data into a third party system and hope third party agents can do something useful with it.
The third is about scale. Helm had community translations of their docs across ten languages, but most were incomplete or out of date, and would be a big ask for their writers to bring them all current by hand. So two writers spent about five iterations over eight hours “teaching” Promptless how to do the work (it’s just skills, which if you read this blog you know is just another kind of docs). They started with a style guide which was not good enough. But they got feedback in about 35 minutes, so they iterated and fixed the problems. They added a glossary, then more language-specific instructions for how to handle existing translations, keep what was still good, update what had drifted, and fill in the gaps. By the end of that process the writers had 10 playbooks that Promptless could execute for 10 languages over the 110 pages of Helm V3 docs. So in one day, 10 PRs opened. Then over the next three weeks the community reviewed and merged them one by one. Pretty clever use case we didn’t build for.
This is what’s possible when your writers have a power tool that rewards the craft, not just a platform that makes things look nice.
If you want to see what this looks like for your team, book a quick 15-min demo with one of our engineers. 14-day free trials!