Prodigent

How Prodigent captures knowledge without anyone writing docs

Knowledge builds up as a side effect of the work your team already does, and every review gets smarter for it.

Knowledge is scattered, or never written down

Every team’s knowledge is split across PRs, Slack threads, incidents and people’s heads. The most important part, why things are the way they are, is usually never written down at all.

#platform-auth
M

Maya Chen 2:14 PM

Don’t add write-heavy paths on the auth DB — it’s shared with billing entitlements. We learned that the hard way after the March outage.

Checkout outage

Open No details yet 12 events · 0 items · 2 weeks ago

It learns from the work you already do

Prodigent picks up context from pull requests and review discussions, Slack messages saved with one click, and incidents and their lessons. No one has to stop and write a doc.

Recent knowledge

  • Don’t add new writes to the shared billing database.

    In app Billingalex · 3 days ago · 1 comment

  • Don’t add write-heavy paths on the auth DB. It’s shared with billing entitlements.

    Slack Auth ServiceMaya Chen · 2 hours ago · 0 comments

  • New writes on the shared billing database took checkout down in March.

    In app Checkout outagesam · 2 weeks ago · 0 comments

A few quick questions to get started

When a team joins, Prodigent asks a handful of calibration questions: what’s being phased out, what needs extra care in review, who owns what. Answers become knowledge straight away, and it checks back every few months.

Components

Billing database

Shared Postgres database for charges and entitlements.

This component is decommissioning. New work should generally go elsewhere.

Details

Type
Database
Status
Decommissioning
Owning team
Billing

Knowledge

What the team knows about this — surfaced while designing

Needs extra care in review. New writes are not allowed.

alex · 3 days ago

It asks the right person at the right moment

When a PR touches something Prodigent doesn’t understand, or contradicts a recorded decision, it asks the relevant developer one quick question. Answer in seconds or dismiss it.

Who owns billing_events, and is a new write allowed?

Question BillingAsked of alex

acme/billing #482

Answer

Billing owns it. New writes are not allowed. Decision #12 still stands.

DismissSave answer

Saved to knowledge

Billing owns billing_events. New writes are not allowed.

Knowledge shows up where it matters

Captured knowledge is pinned to the exact changes it relates to during review, so reviewers see the why without searching for it.

Behaviour Charges.php

+1 -1

@@ record(Charge $charge)
public function record(Charge $charge)
{
- $this->ledger->append($charge);
+ DB::table('billing_events')
Summary Knowledge 1 Feedback

Decision #12 Conflict

Don’t add new writes to the shared billing database.

It gets better with every review

Every answer, dismissal and review sharpens what Prodigent knows, so the next brief is more accurate than the last.

The brief

Step 1 of 4 · The brief · Pending

Author's description

Fix billing bug

What changed

Charges are written straight into billing_events, instead of waiting on the ledger worker.

Why

  • Decision #12decision

Conflicts and unknowns

Billing Don’t add new writes to the shared billing database.

3 of 14 files need review

Review PRs in half the time.

AI-guided, human-led code review, powered by your team’s own knowledge.

Start free See how a review goes