Dosu automates the toil of code maintenance and support for open source projects
Because maintaining code ought to be easier than creating it... right?
Welcome to Forkable’s COSS Corner column, where I profile startups and key figures from the commercial open source software (COSS) space.
In this edition I chat with Devin Stein, founder of Dosu, a two-year-old startup that’s building an AI-powered software development assistant — with a small twist. Rather than focusing on code completion or code reviews like you get with the likes of GitHub Copilot or Codacy, Dosu is more like an AI sidekick that connects to your documents and GitHub repository for the express purpose of maintaining code. This includes automating issue triaging, creating and updating documentation, and answering questions — all the stuff that happens outside the IDE.
As the company’s marketing mantra proclaims: “Maintaining code should be easier than writing it.”
Dosu itself isn’t open source (yet), but its core focus — and its entry point to the business world — lies squarely on open source project maintainers.
“Dosu has been working with OSS maintainers from day one to automate the toil of support and documentation maintenance in open source,” Stein told me in a recent interview.
Read more on Dosu below.
How it works
Developers deploy Dosu inside a project’s GitHub repository, giving it direct access to issues, pull requests (PRs), discussions, and so on, with the option to connect external documentation for Dosu to index.
Users can customize how Dosu interacts with their repository — for instance, they can set it up purely for auto-labeling, which adds tags such as “bug” to issues and pull requests as part of the triaging process. Or, it can be set up for de-duplication only, which identifies issues that are basically the same.
Ultimately, it’s all about trying to “triage issues like a maintainer would,” Stein explained.
Dosu will also do its utmost to answer questions, such as whether a newly-identified bug is in fact known, and already being dealt with.
“Where Dosu is useful is when you have a knowledge gap or knowledge imbalance —you have a few experts, and many users or fewer non-experts working on a project,” Stein added.
Elsewhere, Dosu is also working on a documentation product — which it’s currently inviting applicants for early access — focused on rethinking “…how documentation is generated, shared, and maintained.”
The story so far
Prior to Dosu, Stein worked in various software development and engineering roles, including stints at DocuSign and, most recently, a VC-backed AI startup called Viaduct.
“In my professional work, I've always been very cross-functional -- I've been the person that people ‘know’ on the engineering side, both from the engineering team and also in non-technical teams,” Stein explained. “For example, product managers or sales support would ping me to try and better understand how our product worked.”
In tandem with his day job, Stein has also been active in the open source realm as maintainer on projects such as Sparkmagic and KSOPS.
And it was a culmination of this work in the corporate and open source spheres that led Stein to found Dosu in 2023.
“As an open source maintainer, I basically found myself in the exact same position [as his day job], where much of my time was spent on support and helping share the context I had about the project,” he said.
It was the advent of the large language model (LLM) revolution, sparked by OpenAI & Co., that really sowed the seed for Dosu to differentiate in a sea of code-generation and review tools.
“I was an early GitHub Copilot user, exploring how we can use LLMs for developer productivity,” Stein said. “And I felt like there were a lot of people focused on LLMs' ability to generate code, but less on the knowledge work that engineers have to do which can often be more time-consuming.”
Today, Stein is the sole founder leading a team of eight. Last year, Dosu quietly raised $8 million in a seed round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors — the Eric Schmidt-founded VC firm that has backed the likes of Uber, dev tools company Kong, and fintech giant SoFi.
And this capital will help Dosu as it looks to bolster its commercial aspirations, which could see it become something akin to Stack Overflow Teams, which is focused on harnessing internal knowledge. In fact, Stein said the company is setting out to be like a “next generation Confluence [from Atlassian]” in the next couple of years.
“[That means] in terms of not just answering questions, but actually helping you manage and curate that knowledge over time,” Stein said.
The open source factor
Dosu is already being used by maintainers across myriad open source projects, including Apache Superset and Apache Airflow. It has also seen uptake across a bunch of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, as well as machine learning ecosystem tools such as LangChain.
The Dosu Community Edition is free for up to 500 requests per month for open source maintainers. On the commercial front, the company is also building out various premium tools and services for internal teams, including unlimited requests; support for private repositories; integrations with additional data sources; and enterprise-focused features such as single-sign on (SSO).
While Stein was coy on how many paying customers they have, he said that the company will soon be activating self-serve pricing (as opposd to having to contact the company), which should go some way toward ramping things up commercially.
A big user base for Dosu is developer tooling companies, as you might expect, but Stein says they’re seeing some interest in more “traditional industry,” including regulated spaces that are “operationally complex” such as FinTech and InsurTech.
And this brings us ‘round to the elephant in the room. Despite Dosu’s focus on open source project maintainers, the company doesn’t yet make any of its own products available under an open source license. This could prove problematic if it’s to gain the trust of larger companies in heavily-regulated industries, where the need to self-host is paramount.
“A lot of those customers are interested in self-hosting, but right now we're only working with customers that are comfortable with us being more of a pure SaaS provider,” Stein said. “In future, it's inevitable that we will offer self-hosting. It has been a blocker with a number of larger business.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dosu will go open source — but given Stein’s history in the open source space himself, it does suggest that Dosu will eventually venture down that route.
As it stands, the Dosu Community Edition mimics the role of an open source product to some degree. It serves as a distribution model, enabling individuals to “suck it and see” before asking the powers-that-be at their workplace to sign-up to the enterprise incarnation.
However, there are specifc reasons that Dosu didn’t go open source from the outset.
“The experience of being an open source maintainer has been really nice — you get a lot of opinions and ideas,” Stein said. “But I felt like, as a startup and as a founder, I really wanted us to be able to figure things out as we went along — especially as this space is so new. I wanted us to have the ability and flexibility to change direction, and just figure out getting the core product mechanics working.”