We’re excited to announce Public Spaces, now in beta. Public Spaces allows anyone to ask complex questions about any OSS project, using context from code, commits, conversations, and documentation. You can access popular public spaces like Airflow, Langfuse, Zod, Cal.com, and Dify today and many more coming soon.
Public Spaces is our latest step towards Dosu’s vision of making engineering knowledge accessible to everyone. We want teams to instantly find answers, troubleshoot issues, or learn about new features without needing to search through stale documentation or pinging the engineer who wrote the code.
Last month we introduced One-Click Documentation, beginning to automate the generation and maintenance of knowledge from code. This month, in addition to Public Spaces we’re introducing Save as Answer, reducing the friction to capture key information from conversations, tickets and threads across tools like Slack and GitHub.
We have a few other surprises this month. Read on for the full details!
Public Spaces (Beta)
Public Spaces are free public knowledge bases for open source projects. They enable anyone to ask Dosu questions and learn about an OSS project, even if they're less technical.
Dosu Public Spaces are currently available on all public GitHub repositories where Dosu is installed. You’ll notice a “Chat with Dosu” button in the footer of these projects that you can click to chat directly with Dosu about the project.
Public Spaces can also be created for any open source project where Dosu is not already installed, and we’d love to know what projects you’d like them created for next. To request a new Public Space, head to the #dosu-public-spaces channel in our Discord community. We’ll be rolling out additional Public Spaces in the weeks to come, and we’d love to make sure your favorite project is on the list!
Chatting with a project is the first step for Public Spaces. Next, we'll be working directly with project maintainers to bring their knowledge to life—expanding what's available in Public Spaces and making it even easier to explore, understand, and contribute.
As always we are building this for you and need your feedback—so please check out Public Spaces and let us know what you want to see next.
Save as Answer
Ever thought during a conversation on Slack, this should be in our docs? Dosu now makes this as simple as pressing a button or asking Dosu to "save this". You can do this from the app, from Slack, GitHub issues or discussions.
Detect Related Documentation on Pull Requests
Changes to code are the main reason documentation goes stale, but detecting related documentation on PRs is nearly impossible.. Documentation typically has no connection to code and lives in different directories, repositories, or entirely different applications.
Today, Dosu is narrowing this gap by automatically surfacing relevant Dosu-generated documentation on PRs.
Dosu only maintains published docs. By default, when you generate a new doc in Dosu, it will be in a draft state. Once you want a document to be kept up-to-date, just publish it and then it will be surfaced on PRs as relevant code changes.
If you’ve generated documentation with Dosu already, it’s in the draft state, so head to the app, publish it, and it will automatically be surfaced on PRs.
Dify - Community Highlight
Dify, one of the fastest growing open source dev tools startups in the world, is an open source platform for developing LLM applications. They’ve got an easy to use interface that combines agentic AI workflows, RAG pipelines, model management and more. If you look around online you’ll see enthusiastic users talking about how Dify lets them quickly take AI agents from prototype to production.
We’re thrilled to have Dify as a customer and partner, and we highly recommend checking them out. For more on Dify and how they use Dosu to triage a massive amount of issues and maintain documentation with a small team, read the case study here.
Conclusion
We’re excited about this month’s launches, but we need your feedback. Please try out Public Spaces and let us know which repos you want to see get a public space next.
This coming Tuesday, July 29th at 10am PST we’ve got our July Ask Me Anything coming up with, well, me, and I’ll be recapping all of these announcements and taking questions from the community, so please consider joining me there!
And thanks for being on this journey with us.