A New Way to Do Technical Documentation
Tags: programming, productivity, news, showdev
Published: 2022-10-08 00:16:43

After 15 months of development, we’re thrilled to finally unveil Benji AI. You can sign up for Benji here: [https://benjiai.xyz](https://benjiai.xyz/).

Benji AI was born from our belief that the most important thing for an engineering team to move quickly is having great documentation. We know it’s not glamorous — but it’s critical to unlocking engineering productivity, particularly in companies with remote, hybrid, or async cultures.

We surveyed almost a hundred engineers about what they thought was the most frustrating part of their day, and the overwhelming response was: lack of great documentation. Poor documentation prevents engineering teams from moving at their fastest, and engineers are often spending hours each week answering questions or getting their questions answered. Additionally, existing solutions don’t cut it. Finding the right documentation is extremely challenging — just ask anyone that’s used Confluence wikis or Google Docs for technical documentation. A lot of companies try StackOverflow for Teams but it always fails to get adopted. Instead, engineers prefer asking and answering questions in Slack or Teams instead.

That’s why we created Benji AI: a platform that automatically answers your questions and helps you quickly generate great documentation. Benji constantly absorbs information across your company from sources like pull requests, codebase, internal wikis, Zoom meetings, and Slack. Our goal is to minimize the amount of time engineers are asking questions and maximize the amount of time building features to delight customers.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/dhhko7y389qqj907wl43.png)

Benji AI comes in multiple forms. The first is a Slack app which automatically answers questions in Slack for you if it knows the answer. If not, it’ll find and link relevant wikis, PRs, Zoom meetings, or Slack threads where the question might be answered, with additional context. Benji will also help you find the right people to ask. If you don’t want to ask a question in a public channel, you’re also welcome to DM Benji directly!

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/u3p1erx8d7iep2mzju29.png)

The second is a Zoom meeting assistant. We found that a lot of the context that happens in Zoom meetings (from formal meetings, to ad-hoc debug sessions, to explaining system architecture) goes undocumented or is poorly documented. Additionally, Zoom recordings don’t cut it — engineers strongly prefer reading documents as opposed to watching a Zoom recording. In an effort to ensure the information is preserved and can be easily consumed, Benji will take your meeting notes, create a shareable document out of it, and absorb the information to help answer questions in the future.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ndsxhse4da0um73f09r1.png)

Finally, there’s the Benji desktop app. Not all contextual information happens in public Slack channels. In fact, a lot of important Q&A happens in Slack DMs. Benji has a screenshot tool that helps you document this information while maintaining the privacy of your Slack DMs. Just hit Cmd+Ctrl+S to screenshot your Slack DM or Slack thread and Benji will automatically absorb the information inside the screenshot and document it so that others can find it.

We’ve been using Benji internally for several months now and it has enabled our engineering team to move much faster — particularly so because we are a remote, async team. We hope that you too can supercharge your engineering team’s productivity with Benji. Benji AI is still in beta but we are rapidly onboarding new teams. If you’re interested in trying out the product, sign up [here](https://benjiai.xyz)! We promise it will blow you away.