August Dosu Drop: Self-Documenting PRs

Hello everyone!

It’s finally summer in San Francisco and we’ve got an exciting Dosu Drop for you this month. Self-documenting PRs, topic tagging, rich-text editing, public space explorer and more! The central theme: Dosu makes it easy to have documentation that’s always up-to-date and close-at-hand. Here’s a run-down of the best things we shipped in August.

Self-documenting Pull Requests

One of our most-requested features just launched: self-documenting PRs are now enabled for all users. When you merge a pull request on GitHub, Dosu will find related documentation and automatically update it for you.

Once you merge, Dosu will post a comment on the PR explaining how it changed your documentation. That’s all there is to it. Remember that Dosu will only monitor documentation that has been “Published” in the Dosu app, not “Drafts” — so make sure you’ve got some published documentation to see this feature in action.

We think this will be a game-changer for organizations of all sizes, so we pushed hard to get it into your hands right away. There may still be a few kinks in the ol’ data firehose, and we're working on giving you plenty of options to configure it in the coming days. Please share your feedback on Discord. Our community is growing fast, but it’s still small enough that we take every single message seriously - your input can directly impact the future of Dosu!

Not sure what to do with all the time you’re going to save by not updating stale documentation? You could kill a few minutes reading my recent blog post about The Code Understanding Paradox, which explains how Dosu’s living documentation will help you keep pace with the rise in AI-written code.

More Discoverable Docs with Topics

A philosophical question: If Dosu makes an update, but no one ever reads it, was the change really documented? We think it’s not enough to just have docs that are up-to-date — you also have to be able to find them. To that end, we’ve rolled out better metadata for documentation, including Topics to define groups of related docs.

You can make as many Topics as you need to help keep things organized, and any document can belong to multiple Topics. They’ll appear as collapsible sections on the Documentation sidebar so you can find what you need quickly.

If you’d rather not have to manage Topics yourself, we’re right there with you. We’re planning to let Dosu take the wheel, just like our much-loved GitHub auto-labeling. You can expect to hear more from us about that next month.

Improved markdown editing

Dosu is hard at work trying to help you never write docs again. But when you do need to edit a Dosu doc by hand, you can control text style and formatting easier than ever before using our new Rich Text Editor. If you prefer a keyboard-only workflow, you can still write markdown tags inline and they should be recognized automatically.

Explore more Public Spaces

Last month, we launched Public Spaces, where you can chat with Dosu about open source projects directly in our app. At first, we didn’t do a great job of showcasing all the Public Spaces that were available, so by popular demand we now have an Explore page where you can browse the current selection or search for your favorite repo. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, use the “Request” button to let us know.

You can control the visibility of your organization’s Spaces in the revamped Space Settings menu, where you’ll also find a shareable URL.

Free-tier usage limits

We’ve had many questions about free-tier usage limits for internal and OSS usage. We’ve started enforcing usage limits, so you will see a templated rate limit message if you’ve gone over the free-tier monthly quota. As a reminder, OSS usage of Dosu is rate-limited per user. If you have power users of Dosu within your community, they may be prompted to create an account or upgrade.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me directly and let’s chat.

Community Spotlight & Maintainer AMA: Trilium

Tomorrow - Thursday, August 21st, at 10am PDT (5pm UTC) - we’ll be hosting an AMA with Trilium maintainer Jon Fuller on our Discord. Trilium Notes is a legendary OSS personal knowledge base and note-taking application. In 2024, it entered maintenance mode after its original maintainer moved on, but the community wasn’t ready to let it go. Check out our latest case study to learn how Dosu helped the Trilium Next community revive the mothballed project. We were pleased to see Jon’s endorsement that Dosu not only “isn’t useless,” it’s actually “probably better than what I would have initially replied with.”

That’s all for this month! If you can’t wait for September to get more Dosu in your life, you can always find us on Discord.