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side, I used to run engineering at a fintech company, and since no developer enjoys updating docs, they often went out-of-date and customers complained.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!