Crazy, I was watching some some smalltalk 80 demos this weekend. And was like I bet you could ship a js image that does some of this. Someone must be working on it.
I don’t know if that’s your teams inspiration but there’s a a lot of overlap.
My thought would be it feels like it is helps enable “careless” PMs, rather than make better stories.
I added a simple user story “I want to be able to check our prices against competitor prices”
Imo, a reasonable and simple business ask, but technically complicated (dirty and old data, low user fault tolerance, heuristically matching).
In chatGPT fashion, it confidently provides a series of acceptance criteria that fills out the story, but is either questionable or redundant.
“The tool should be able to compare prices of our products against our competitors' prices.
The tool should be able to display the results in a clear and concise manner.
The tool should be able to be accessed from the administrator dashboard.
The tool should be able to be used on both desktop and mobile devices.”
A PM/team could go through and audit. It would be a useful exercise, but a team who would do that likely wouldn’t need this tool. Maybe consider fashioning the UI to idea generation?
As it is now, this feels like a careless PM would copy and paste this without checking.
Valid point, I received this feedback on reddit as well.
I really want to focus the tool on generating good stories though - I had the idea that to validate input better and give feedback, before actually generating stories. E.g., try to suggest something like „Hey, this is too broad and should be an epic, with possibly these 4 stories“, „Hey, your description was too shallow, can you elaborate on xyz?“. Ultimately, it’s a tool that I want to see used for scrum stories in my teams.
I will update the roadmap with these ideas and inputs, thank you for taking your time and leave a comment!
Im not sure if it’s future proofing exactly, but I’m placing my bets on Nix powered development systems.
The conceptual clarity combined with sparse documentation, rough edged user land, and the army of edge cases give me flashes of Docker in 2013/14.
It’s a pain to use but the promise is there. When setup and working, Nix seems like _the_ way forward for reproducible builds and dev environments at any 20+ dev team.
I work in dev experience at a larger tech company. I work on many different REPLs, often jumping into unfamiliar projects- in my first three months I’ve worked on go, python, node, terraform, k8s, etc.
With nix I’m able to clone a repo in an ecosystem I don’t use, create a couple files (flake.nix + .envrc) and reliably create a working, isolated dev environment that works and doesn’t mess my other projects… gaming changing.
(Plus I took the plunge after system issues to move to a VM running NixOS, defined in my dotfile repo.)
The language is difficult, the documentation needs to get there, the amount of breaking or confusing api are big hurdles. I think some simple wrapper like https://devenv.sh may be what gets the industry on board.
A company I worked at was in the business of classified ads in the early two thousands.
“We” started selling typeset ads at some point to customers unbeknownst to the tiny fresh grad three person tech team.
So we did what we had to do which was to run open office headless on a Linux box under our bosses desk.
It would accept type setting parameters, and we would simulate one key press at a time. We would send the print command keyboard shortcut and keys to print to a pdf and retrieve the files with rsync.
We didn’t know any better and I’m still proud of that.
After an initial small investment, I was able to take notes.
Then it was keeping my todos on projects at work, getting a list, etc. Then I could add source blocks and execute them.
Now it’s a literate and repl driven engine that is nearly a daily driver. I love the workflow because I build up the code and tests as I’m playing and tweaking it. The feedback loop is very strong. Plenty of maintenance cost though.
