Automating Documentation: Updates from the Factory Floor

Remember that little tool I am working on, the one that turns Jira stories into support articles? Well, happy to report, I haven't given up on it yet.

Here is a small update on where this is going and what roadblocks I came across so far.

First up, LLM drama. I started with using the Deepseek R1 API for the proof of concept (cheap and available). But as these things go, popularity struck and the Deepseek API became about as responsive as my brain before morning coffee. So I will move this bit to use Mistral in the near future. Europe for the win and all that!

Next up I have been tuning the output even more, so even with bad input it sort of produces something acceptable, one of my "test" stories is this one for example:

"As a user, I want a dark mode toggle, So that I can stop burning my retinas at 2 AM."

With acceptance criteria like:

"Add a button somewhere (idk, top right?)" and "Don't break anything else."

But here's the thing, most user stories aren't always those perfectly crafted works of art we see in the training materials.

Most of the time they are rushed, vague, and sometimes just plain amusing.

So I spent some time improving the prompting to handle these... let's call them "concise" stories. Now it can take even the most minimal input as shown above and still produce something you can actually work with.

Also, I will be adding support for multiple LLM providers (Mistral for personal use as mentioned, with Google and Azure as options, for the ones that want to keep their user stories "in house")

Oh, and that dark mode test story. Because apparently, I'm not the only one coding at 2 AM, I have actually added the dark mode toggle, top right of course :)

What's next? Well, that depends. What's your support / documentation pipeline looking like these days? Still doing it the hard way? ??

#TechWriting #Documentation #AI #DeveloperTools #ProductDevelopment