It's official: the AI hype is in full force. One of the things I'm thinking about lately has been what this can do for developer tools and the answer is: a lot.
Last week I tweeted wondering whether you could now use GPT to ingest your GitHub discussions and streamline support questions. To my knowledge that hasn't come into existence (yet) but it has for developer documentation.
First, Supabase has integrated with OpenAI to add the ability to ask questions within their developer docs to create a "Supabase Clippy" 📎:
This is built using OpenAI Embeddings – a way to send context to GPT which you can basically use to "train" it on your own content.
And now Scribo has released a little tool that in 3-clicks will scan your GitHub repo and let you ask questions about your docs!
Here it is answering a question about React.
"What's the second argument to useEffect?"
Now a little harder:
"Can you show me a React hook that stores a previous value?"
And now for the big one:
"Can you show me how to use React and Recharts to graph users who have joined my site over time?"
Darn. But it's only a matter of time, right? ChatGPT can handle it.
It's apparent that AI-enabled workflows will produce average-to-good content very quickly. It's also going to transform the developer learning experience.
The kind of docs that exist will likely change too – less task-based and "what is this" because GPT will be able to generate tutorials on-the-fly just like it did above.
It'll be more important to document and teach concepts with deeper explanations of "why" to guide developers in the right direction. Once they know where they're headed, they can use AI-assisted tools to get there faster.
Why write a content marketing article on using A with B when developers can ask your docs a question and generate a full integration sample or demo app?
All the more reason to ditch endless articles and start moving toward richer, deeper, and more creative content and education.
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
