How Mautic pairs Promptless with human review to catch up on docs
Originally written for Mautic . A developer just merged a big feature into an app repo, and 'update the docs' lands somewhere on their to-do list. Week after week, it keeps sliding down, until it's forgotten. If you've worked on an open source project, this probably sounds familiar. It's exactly what was happening to Mautic's docs, until we found a way to keep docs up to date automatically. Why…
Mautic, an open-source project, faced a common issue – its documentation lagged behind the code releases. Developers working on the project juggling day jobs and other features often pushed aside updating the documentation. This resulted in outdated instructions, causing confusion for users. To tackle this problem, Mautic discovered Promptless, an AI tool capable of writing and updating documentation.
Promptless connects directly to Mautic's documentation repositories, keeping several versions in sync automatically. When a developer opens a Pull Request (PR), Promptless generates a draft of the required documentation update. If the code PR isn't merged yet, Promptless marks the docs PR as a draft. Once merged, the docs PR is ready for review.
If the developer makes more changes, Promptless updates the draft correspondingly. Initially, Promptless suggested changes on its dashboard, which were reviewed before being turned into actual PRs. After seeing Promptless's consistent performance, the team opted for fully automated workflow. While Promptless handles the initial draft, a human still reviews it for grammar, wording, and style, and the developer who made the code change also reviews the draft.
This human review catches any mistakes or inconsistencies. Over four months, Promptless merged 129 of its PRs, while over four years, developers merged 392 PRs. Promptless also sped up the turnaround time, taking an average of 27 days to merge compared to 98 days for manually written docs. The release gap was also closed, with documentation catching up to the code within a few versions.
Although Promptless is efficient, it's the human review that ensures accuracy and quality. The Promptless team's support has been crucial, addressing Mautic's specific needs and making the necessary adjustments.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
