Today we’re happy to announce Codespeed.

Codespeed is an AI-powered developer platform including auto-syncing documentation, code tours, and in-code collaboration that lives inside your code editor and on the web. We’re revolutionizing the most costly parts of engineering to build better software, faster.

We’re revolutionizing developer workflows through assistive technology and AI for in-code documentation, collaboration, knowledge building and onboarding for frictionless experience between docs, code, and institutional knowledge building.

As a coder since the age of 10 and a professional software engineer since the age of 16, I’ve never found a team that was actually happy with their internal documentation. Writing code can be exhilarating when you’re in the flow, but traditional workflows around documentation slow engineers down between disjointed wikis, muddied inline docs, and knowledge scattered among numerous browser tabs and apps that’s rarely up-to-date.

Until today, internal documentation at technology companies has been universally frustrating, leading to incredibly costly onboarding, creeping technical debt, and completely avoidable rewrites and more.

Codespeed is fixing these deeply broken parts of software development with documentation and knowledge tools inside the code editor, fully versioned in the codebase for freshness and security, all backed by the power of AI leading to happier, faster developers and higher-quality code.

What is documentation?

Documentation is a record of how engineers are thinking about their code. This might include overviews of key areas, demonstrations of how to get started in a specific function, key architectural components, best practices, and essential explanations of how the technology meets the needs of the business.

The best documentation is continuously updated by all contributors and translates complex, technical aspects of the code into easily understood, organized sections that allow any engineer to jump in and write high-quality code instantly.

How current documentation tools fail

The problem is that the “ideal state” of frequently updated wikis and a team perfectly in tune with every part of a codebase is rarely achieved through traditional documentation tools.

Wikis, project management websites, or even 100s of scattered Slack conversations are “physically” located far away from the actual codebase or process of writing code. The disjointed location creates friction in every engineer’s workflow, meaning engineers need to navigate to another app far away from each line of code itself to update any institutional knowledge, translating to documentation that rarely stays fresh — and more commonly — is never recorded in the first place. Engineers also experience this friction attempting to find answers in 10 different app and way too many browser tabs.

As a result, valuable contextual knowledge beyond the code itself can be rare, meaning code takes a lot longer to write, bugs and tech debt arise much more often, and onboarding new developers is often slog. Documentation is truly one of the biggest pain points among any engineer you talk to today.

Software velocity and quality affects everyone

As technology continues to “eat the world” universal problems and friction in software engineering affect nearly every business on the planet with bugs, slower feature releases, higher costs to use the software, and more.

From downtime for millions of Shopify e-commerce merchants for hours at a time to outages of core point-of-sale systems like Square used by millions of restaurants across the globe, the foundational problems that arise during software engineering affect millions of businesses downstream.

Here’s a closer look at how Codespeed solves these incredibly high-cost problems.

• Auto-syncing, in-code documentation backed by AI: Share, reference and build contextual knowledge through a layer of in-code documentation located inside your code editor. Every annotation is automatically synced as your codebase changes through automatic integrations with GitHub, Bitbucket and more. Our documentation tools support rich content such as images, headings, video embeds, todo lists, and more.
• Integrate Codespeed docs directly into your IDE, including VS Code: Codespeed moves the process of recording and referencing documentation away from wikis and into your code editor.
• Code Tours combine multiple annotations in an ordered list: Codespeed’s Code Tours connect multiple pieces of documentation into a playable, ordered list and walkthrough that automates engineer onboarding to new codebases.
• Collaboration tools make code more social: Each piece of documentation includes a social layer for developers to connect team members to the code. Tag a team member into a new Code Tour to get them up to speed quickly, or pull in other team members during rapid prototyping or development to work and iterate through core logic to consider various tech debt tradeoffs before reaching a point of no return.
• Powerful search: Engineers can instantly reference both discussions and documentation with search tools that index each part of your knowledge base.

Revolutionizing the developer experience

Here are just a few of the day zero uses cases with Codespeed. Setup only takes a few minutes so you can get started adding documentation and creating Code Tours in minutes.

• Automate engineer onboarding: Traditional onboarding usually involves multiple engineers “pair programming” with a new engineer, draining key resources away from other business objectives. Codespeed automates this process with Code Tours that combine multiple annotations and discussions into a single, ordered list and walkthrough that engineers can “replay” anytime. Create Tours with specific speciality focus such as front-end vs. backend, or API architecture and more.
• Eliminate gatekeeping, insure against engineering turnover, and build real institutional knowledge: Codespeed clears engineering bottlenecks with documentation that’s recorded more regularly and at a higher quality and potential information silos among one or a few contributors are eliminated at the source.
• Eliminate tech debt through collaboration during rapid prototyping: Codespeed’s collaboration and documentation tools help eliminate costly tech debt with wider understanding of tradeoffs and architectural decisions across engineering teams.

Join us

Codespeed is fundamentally reimagining how to build better software faster with better knowledge, documentation, and collaboration tools. To get your team on Codespeed, request an invite as we re-imagine developer knowledge building together.

We’re also working with the brightest minds in engineering and startups. If you’d like to revolutionize the entire application development lifecycle from ideation to shipment, check out our open roles.

And of course, if you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.