Mintlify taps AI to automatically generate documentation from code – TechCrunch

Mintlify, a startup creating software program to automate software program documentation duties, at this time introduced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed spherical led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. CEO Han Wang says that the proceeds will probably be put towards product improvement and doubling Mintlify’s core, three-person staff by the tip of the yr.

Ithaca, New York-based Mintlify was co-founded in 2021 by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee — each software program engineers by commerce. Wang beforehand co-launched Foodful, an startup that developed a cloud-based monitoring system for cows, and Pe•ple, an internet buyer group platform that was acquired by Tribe in early 2021. Lee was a co-founder at Pe•ple earlier than briefly becoming a member of Duolingo as an engineer.

Wang mentioned the concept for Mintlify got here from his and Lee’s experiences in software program improvement, which concerned working with documentation that wasn’t at all times full or of the best high quality. Their observations agree with a 2017 GitHub survey, which discovered that 93% of builders think about incomplete or outdated documentation to be a pervasive downside.

“We’ve labored as software program engineers at firms in all phases starting from startups to massive tech and located that all of them endure from dangerous documentation, if it even existed in any respect,” Wang advised TechCrunch in an e-mail interview. “Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and people leaping into new codebases. It helps senior devs save time from explaining their code to others sooner or later. For public-facing and open-source merchandise, documentation has a direct impression on person adoption.”

Picture Credit: Mintlify

Mintlify goals to handle the challenges round documentation with automation, particularly auto-generating documentation. The corporate’s platform reads code and creates docs to clarify it, leveraging applied sciences together with pure language processing and net scraping.

Wang declined to disclose extra about Mintlify’s technical underpinnings, however producing documentation from code is properly inside the realm of risk with at this time’s AI methods. That’s evidenced by the truth that Mintlify has a number of rivals taking related approaches, together with Documatic, whose AI system routinely generates changelogs and explanations from code along with documentation.

Wang asserts that Mintlify offers “considerably” higher-quality outcomes than its rivals, and — not like some — doesn’t power builders to host documentation on a cloud service. “Mintlify’s mission is to unravel documentation rot by creating steady documentation into a normal follow for software program groups,” Wang added. “[W]hen engineering managers are actively searching for options for higher documentation practices, … that’s after we step in.”

Past producing documentation, Mintlify routinely scans for “stale” documentation and detects how customers interact with the documentation to enhance its readability. (Wang emphasised that the platform doesn’t retailer code and encrypts all person knowledge at relaxation and in transit.) Mintlify, which is free for particular person builders, additionally integrates with current techniques together with Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub for automating process administration and improvement workflows.

In response to Wang, adoption of Mintlify’s free plan has been rising 20% each week since its January launch. With the person base now eclipsing 6,000 lively accounts, the corporate plans to shift its focus to a premium providing oriented towards enterprise clients.

“The pandemic standardized a decentralized and asynchronous work setting. This made high-quality documentation essential to reaching environment friendly communication, onboarding, and product improvement,” Wang mentioned. “Our enlargement into workflow automations is addressing the problem by focusing on the engineering managers with our current fanbase serving as champions.”