Promptless - Auto-update Your Docs Every Time You Ship
Promptless watches your PRs and support tickets, then automatically drafts and pushes documentation updates to Readme, Mintlify, Intercom, and more.
TL;DR
TL;DR: Promptless is an AI teammate that automatically updates your documentation when your team ships code — connecting to PRs, support tickets, and Slack to draft and push doc changes to Readme, Mintlify, Intercom, Zendesk, and GitHub.
Source and Accuracy Notes
- Product: https://gopromptless.ai
- Live demo on your own docs: https://gopromptless.ai/demo
- Demo video: https://youtu.be/pmslSl8dOgE
- HN Launch: 107 points, author
prithvi2206
What Is Promptless?
Documentation rot is one of the most persistent problems in software engineering. Developers hate updating docs, so they go stale. Customers complain. AI coding assistants that rely on docs get confused. The cycle repeats.
Promptless breaks this cycle by giving you an AI teammate that watches your development workflow and automatically drafts documentation updates whenever something changes.
The tool connects to your docs platform (Readme, Mintlify, Intercom, Zendesk, GitHub) and monitors triggers like new pull requests, support tickets, or Slack messages. When a trigger fires, Promptless drafts the updated documentation and can push it directly to wherever your docs live.
Unlike a simple spell-checker or linter, Promptless builds a “product ontology” when you first connect it — a semantic map of your product’s concepts, entities, resources, and their relationships. This takes anywhere from several minutes to over an hour depending on the number of articles, but it means the agent understands what your product does, not just what words appear on each page.
Setup Workflow
Getting started takes under five minutes:
Step 1: Connect Your Docs Platform
Sign up at gopromptless.ai/hn and authorize OAuth with your docs platform. Supported targets include:
- Readme
- Mintlify
- Intercom
- Zendesk
- GitHub repositories
- Notion (via integration)
Step 2: Connect Your Workflow Triggers
Promptless listens for events from:
- GitHub/GitLab webhooks — new PRs, merged commits
- Slack — tag
@Promptlessin any channel - Support tools — Jira, Linear (via OAuth)
- Manual trigger — one-click from Slack for immediate updates
For GitHub, you install the Promptless GitHub app and it automatically gets notified of new pull requests. No webhook configuration needed.
Step 3: Let the Ontology Build
The first time Promptless connects to your docs, it reads every article and builds the product ontology. You can watch progress in the dashboard — large doc sites with 40+ articles may take 45 to 60 minutes for the initial index.
Step 4: Promptless Runs in the Background
Once the ontology is built, Promptless operates autonomously. When a trigger fires, it:
- Pulls context from the related PR or ticket (via OAuth-connected tools like Jira/Linear)
- Finds relevant existing docs using the ontology
- Drafts updated content explaining the change
- Creates a PR or directly pushes to your docs platform (configurable per target)
Deeper Analysis
The Product Ontology Is the Core Differentiator
Most doc-updater tools work by detecting keywords — if your PR touches the “payments” module, find pages containing “payments” and update them. This produces mechanistic edits that often miss the point.
Promptless instead builds a semantic graph of your product. When your PR changes the payment retry logic, the ontology understands that “retry” relates to “payment failures,” “checkout flow,” and “customer notification settings” — even if those pages never use the word “retry” explicitly.
This matters for AI coding assistants. A growing problem is AI agents (like Cursor or Claude) that blindly follow documentation and hallucinate steps for features that have changed. Stale docs make this worse. Promptless keeps the source material current, which directly improves the reliability of AI-assisted coding.
Real Use Cases Beyond PRs
The founders expected users to care most about PR-triggered updates. But early customers revealed unexpected patterns:
- Slack Connect channels — One customer triggers doc updates from Slack with a single click, managing customer-facing content separately from the product team
- Release notes cadence — A content team that only updates when the product team publishes release notes every two weeks
- AI support agent accuracy — Intercom’s Fin AI performs better when the source docs are current, so keeping documentation accurate directly improves AI support quality
Open Source Projects
Promptless has published updates for several open-source projects including Ansible, Prefect, Ray, and Ollama. Many projects have over 40% of recent commits as documentation corrections — automating those updates reduces friction for contributors and improves developer experience for end-users.
Practical Evaluation Checklist
- [ ] OAuth integration with your docs platform completes without errors
- [ ] Product ontology builds successfully on your doc site’s page count
- [ ] PR-triggered update fires and drafts content within minutes
- [ ] Output connects to the right existing docs (not just keyword-matched)
- [ ] Update PR or direct push lands correctly in your target platform
- [ ] Manual Slack trigger works when
@Promptlessis tagged - [ ] Jira/Linear integration pulls relevant context into the draft
Security Notes
Promptless operates through OAuth integrations — it reads your documentation and monitors your workflow tools but does not require broad repository access. The GitHub app uses minimal permissions (read PRs, write to docs-target repos only).
For enterprise deployments, the product ontology is built and stored per-customer — no cross-tenant document sharing occurs.
Verify the specific OAuth scopes before authorizing, particularly for GitHub and Jira integrations.
FAQ
Q: How long does the initial product ontology take to build?
A: It depends on the number of articles and the complexity of your docs. Small sites with under 20 pages might finish in 5 to 10 minutes. Large documentation sets with 40+ articles can take 45 to 60 minutes. You can monitor progress in the dashboard.
Q: Can Promptless update docs for a product that has no existing docs yet?
A: No — Promptless works by understanding your existing documentation structure and mapping new changes to relevant pages. It cannot generate documentation from scratch for a product with no prior docs.
Q: Which docs platforms are supported for direct push?
A: Direct push (no PR review) is supported for Readme, Mintlify, Intercom (via thearticles API), and GitHub repositories. Other platforms like Zendesk generate a PR that a human must review before publishing.
Q: Does Promptless work with AI coding assistants like Cursor or Claude?
A: Indirectly. Promptless keeps documentation accurate, which means AI assistants that reference those docs (which is most of them) get better context. The founders specifically mentioned this as a pain point — AI coding assistants increasingly rely on docs, and stale docs cause them to hallucinate incorrect steps.
Conclusion
Documentation rot is a solved problem by different standards — you can hire a technical writer, implement a doc-as-code workflow, or accept that your docs will lag behind your code. Promptless automates the maintenance burden without requiring process changes or headcount.
The product ontology approach is genuinely differentiated from keyword-matching doc tools. By understanding what your product does rather than just what words appear on each page, it produces updates that actually match the intent of code changes.
Free trial available at gopromptless.ai/hn. Works with Readme, Mintlify, Intercom, Zendesk, and GitHub.