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Ask HN: Automated Website Documentation
5 points by digitcatphd on Feb 13, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
What would the interest level be for building custom software based agents for websites that perform activities on behalf of their users? Think about a CoPilot that did things for you using a visual browser agent for your own website.

I just spent 30 minutes reviewing hubspot support documentation to setup something and their documentation was outdated and incorrect. I feel like there are a couple opportunities here.

1. Automatic website change detection which notifies support teams to update affected documentation, or possibly updates it automatically using visual browsing agents detecting changes to sequences and patterns.

2. Agents trained on the site that perform actions on behalf of users, for instance, I could have asked it to set up all that for me.



So, like Selenium but without the coding?


Partially, but here is my logic:

1. Manually programming this to automatically get meaningful feedback directly related to the documentation would require an agent or sifting through error logs. Otherwise, coding the patterns equivalent to support documentation is tedious manually, perhaps does not outweigh the benefits.

2. Without the ability to update the documentation directly, the system yields little benefit. Perhaps and agent trained on the codebase can (more efficiently) use automation tests based on the flow pattern rather than a visual browser agent, but it would still need the agent architecture.


As someone who writes a fair number of docs, I would not want AI-generated wordsalad in them. AI is usually way too verbose and not to the point to be helpful. It also makes a lot of mistakes on technical products. Then again, compared to not having docs at all this may be preferable.




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