
Jottles
Quick thoughts written in the margins of the day. What's a jottle?


my new automated support agent surprised me today
for context - I shipped a new "frame" feature for ColorBliss a few weeks ago. A power user replied to my changelog email with a few use cases where it could be made more useful. I put it in my backlog. I had a PR open for it for a while, and finally got around to merging it behind a feature flag this morning. I knew later I would have to go back and email the customer that it was good to go. When I logged into my help desk later - I found that my agent had already notified him! Here's what it did: - The help desk software I use has an automation that will re-open a closed ticket if an attached issue in Linear is marked done (this is super helpful for telling users their feature has shipped) - When I merged the PR, the issue itself was marked as done, and then the support ticket was re-opened. - When the support ticket was re-opened, my automated support agent checked the context of the ticket, reviewed updates in linear, and was able to see that the feature had shipped. - The agent automatically sent a note to the customer letting him know his feature request had shipped What I love about this is that it followed the full process I normally follow. The only difference is that I added the automated support agent that was able to close the loop on my behalf, in exactly the way I would normally do it. Anyway, I guess this is a long way of saying that I'm working on a new product - an AI support agent that is actually capable of resolving issues on your behalf.







one thing i've been working on over the past month is automating some of the more rote parts of my product / business stack, and putting myself into the reviewer / decider position instead of the investigator position as much as possible
this has been going very well in support, to the point where i have almost all the context i need on every support ticket to make a decision / resolve it when I open it it's also helped me on some things that i've historically neglected, like database health. once a week i get 5 or so issues in linear for improvements to my database that I can review and ship as I have time


It's been a while since I've had something exciting for my home team product testers to try out for ColorBliss - but made some progress on two long-awaited feature requests
kept the team busy yesterday afternoon with the first batch of color by number coloring pages! got really good feedback from them and it should be ready for larger testing next week :)














the engagement baiting on chatgpt has gotten really bad in the past few days. first noticed it over the weekend.
i'll ask it a question, and it will give me an answer and a long rationale for that answer and then afterwards say something like, there's actually one secret thing that i'm not telling you about this, do you want to know? do i want to know the secret? yes. do i now doubt everything it just told me? also yes. i'm sure it juices the engagement numbers but i find it highly annoying


















