In the last month, I built Onri AI to scratch my own itch: "How to find someone in my company who knows about XYZ?" I think many Hacker News readers may find it useful, thus sharing it here :) By connecting your company's Git and Jira, you have a search engine that gives you "who knows about ...?". Zero maintenance required from your team. Now, let me explain why I built it. Many years ago, I worked as a software engineer in a FAANG company with thousands of engineers. I noticed that, whenever I need to work on something out of my immediate team's scope, it's nearly impossible to know the right person to reach out to. I'd email my manager: "hey, do you know who worked on this old feature XYZ?". If I'm lucky, that email would then be forwarded to other managers and directors and, days later, reached the exact engineer who worked on it. If I'm in bad luck, the email went nowhere and I was left alone digging up old code and documents. The scenario above occurred daily in various shapes: 1. When I start on a project and I need to set up a new server --> "Who can grant me access to a new server?" 2. I picked up an old feature --> "Who can give me a quick knowledge dump on the system design from 5 years ago?" 3. My server log showed an error stack trace from api.phoenix.messaging... --> "Who worked on this internal messaging API called Phoenix?" There are many potential solutions: 1. Documentation: this is usually my first step but only if the documentation exists and is up-to-date, which is rarely the case. 2. Git blame: useful if I know which code I should be reading, but it's very time consuming when all I need is a high-level system design walk-through. 3. Ask around: this is what I usually do, and it's a hit or miss depending on my manager's work connection. 4. Force everyone to keep a work log and search that: doable but it comes with very high maintenance cost. Given that many engineers work with Git and some ticketing system (Jira, Asana, etc), I think it's possible to establish the organization knowledge of "who worked on what" for the entire company simply by looking at all Git history and tickets. I ended up building it as an internal tool in that FAANG company, and it worked! The search results were amazing, and I no longer needed those long email threads to find some team I hadn't even heard of. Got hundreds of daily users. That's why I'm building Onri AI, as I think it would be useful for the public! I chose the name Onri because this tool breaks down tribal knowledge, and the Onri logo symbolizes the process to tear down walls within a company, visually starting out with 4 walls, then 3 walls, then 2, then 1. I hope you enjoy it, and I'm open to any feedback! If you got questions, please leave a comment or reach me at support@onri.ai |