AI-assisted doc creation

The project shows a series of assistive creation for technical code documentation platform — from Pull Request to Doc, Code Flow Diagrams, Doc Rules.

Role

AI integration strategy
UX design
Prompt engineering

Team

2 PMs
3 Engineers

Duration

3 months (2023 Q2)

Impact

AI exposure led to a 26.1% conversion rate from free to trial users — demonstrating clear monetization potential
62 total workspace enabled AI
initiative made us cope up with market’s competition

⬇ Details on how we came to this solutions ⬇

Context

When ChatGPT explode around the year of 2023, our company started to think about how we can stay relevant in the market. Since we are a documentation platform, we started to look at where it make sense to integrate AI, and not just

Identify AI opportunities

We took inspiration on both note-taking platform and code assistant tool to find areas we can integrate AI. They are mostly categorized in 3 areas — creation, instant understanding, and discovery. Here are some of the candidates:

Name	Description	Category
Text auto-completion	Complete current word or phrase while user types	Discovery
Improve writing	Improve written text and phrases with AI	Creation
Code changes to doc⭐	Turn any release code changes into doc	Creation
Topic to doc	Get suggestion on doc outline or sections	Creation
Mermaid diagram⭐	Help draw diagram without having to know syntax	Creation
Doc rules⭐	Identify use cases for docs base on its content	Discovery
Question to doc	Turn FAQ or recently asked questions into a doc	Question, Creation
Explain snippets	Fill-in description for included code blocks	Creation

We decided to use prioritization matrix to identify the top 3 items we want to deliver, making sure we are weighing both easy technical implementation and strong user needs.

Integrating AI

Some of these features already have an initial placement and functionality, we would like to integrate back into what we currently have. For example, before AI, we provide pulling in code-changes for developers to have a starting point to write their code, but everything written is manual through developers. Now, we can add another step for AI to synthesize the code changes and other variables such as PR (pull-request) title, discussion, etc to produce a draft.

As part of the whole feature, we've also changed our GitHub comment into one that has AI integrated on it.

Unlike code changes, which is an end-to-end, widget type creation, where AI drafts a whole doc for you to edit, integrating AI with Mermaid means you can trigger it at anytime whilst creating doc. This mean aside from adding entry point to an empty doc, it's more important to present the newly added AI capability when user triggers it from the slash command.

Some design considerations we need to figure out are:

How visible do we want this to be? Do we show this on demand or hidden
Do we want to show AI only on empty mermaid block or show even if there's existing diagram

It was clear that the biggest problem for users was to remember or work with Mermaid syntaxes, hence the decision to keep it visible at all times.

For doc rules, since we want to support creating the use case both with or without a doc, it was clear that we can't have this entry point on the existing doc sidebar. We decided to keep it only in our coding platform plugin.

Create rules with doc:

User selects a doc
User ask AI to generate potential use cases
User selects best match use case, or
User define details — regex, desc., etc

Create rules with regular expression (regex):

User selects "no doc" option
User define details — regex, desc., etc

Code changes to doc

Instantly create technical code documentation from code changes, along with other additional insights.

Code flow diagrams

Generate visual diagrams to explain your codebase, without needing to know any Mermaid syntax.

Doc rules

AI suggests use cases and triggers for when documentation should appear, ensuring coding guidelines surface at the exact right moment.