Prioritizing unifying docs and building doc integrations with Popular coding assistants
As more and more coding assistants get even more popular, I think tools like Convex should prioritize developing easier ways for documentation to integrate with coding assistants.
I only suggest this, because I genuinely want Convex to win! Having extensively used all other offerings, from early adoption of prisma, to supabase, drizzle, trpc, grpc, REST, years of graphql(still presently for day job), I think Convex has a real shot at winning and I am completely rooting for you.
The work you've done with the application, customer support, docs, guides, youtube, stack, hackathons, HIPAA and SOC2, have all been awesome. Love it all.
However, we move with the future. And the future is - I need to hire a new Engineer. He has not worked with Convex - proof from my several failed attempts at hiring Engineers with some knowledge both from the jobs channel and upwork. Said Engineer needs to ramp up quickly on Convex, and has to spend several days going through the docs, finally finding convex-helpers, breaths a sigh of slight relief. After several PR feedback, finally starts reading the Stack docs I share, etc.
Said Engineer already has Cursor, or Replit, or ClaudeDev, etc. Decides to ask, and it gives it the most inefficient query ever. Probably wrong. Wrangles with it. Puts up a PR, and we spend the next few days going back and forth.
Better future: Said Engineer setups up the project, uses working current docs integration that bring in the juice from the awesome guides on Stack with convex helpers, chat does a much better job. PR feedback is shorter. Everyone is happy.
I did setup the docs with Cursor, and it is still not great. Spent a few hours trying to scrape Convex docs for Replit to setup for a new engineer, with a short guide from the Replit team, no luck.
At the end of the day, the ability to easily hire people for your stack is a key factor in adoption.
Some things that would be great to see:
- Continued in comment:
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Thanks for posting in <#1088161997662724167>.
Reminder: If you have a Convex Pro account, use the Convex Dashboard to file support tickets.
- Provide context: What are you trying to achieve, what is the end-user interaction, what are you seeing? (full error message, command output, etc.)
- Use search.convex.dev to search Docs, Stack, and Discord all at once.
- Additionally, you can post your questions in the Convex Community's <#1228095053885476985> channel to receive a response from AI.
- Avoid tagging staff unless specifically instructed.
Thank you!
Some things that would be great to see:
- Unify the docs. The base docs website shows basic convex that an Engineer would realize could be better only after they have gone far into their project and eventually stumble upon convex helpers which is not mentioned anywhere in the docs.
- Build easy to use docs integration with AI coding tools. Reach out to them, and work on building something in.
- Also unify the guides on stack and bring them into the same docs repo
- Make the docs site public so that people can get the markdown files themselves if no integration exists. If it exists, I could not find it.
Again, I love Convex. So much so that I'd be willing to invest in the next raise, if a small portion is opened up to the public, similar to how Mercury did. We love Mercury.(https://communityround.com/case-studies/mercury)
I think the work done on this so far has been great. But doing some of the above will make adoption easier for future startups exploring their next tech stack. Especially for non-trivial projects.
Thank you.
Guide I followed for Replit. Did not work: And again, would need to do something else for the guides on Stack and convex-helpers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLT08ugfpvA
Thanks this is a great write up! We are thinking about a lot of these things.
- @Tom Redman has done a bunch of work packaging up Convex to be consumed by cursor. We should make it easy for all relevant tools.
- Open Sourcing docs is on our list.
- Some of the convex-helpers have become fairly standard patterns, even though they started as proofs of concepts. We plan on pulling these out as stand alone libraries and documenting them in our docs.
All great feedback as always.
Thanks. And glad to hear you are thinking of some of these already. 🙏
what is Mercury?
Did you click the link? Mercury is a bank for startups.
yeah but didn't find a link to mercury itself
Mercury
Mercury | Banking for Startups
A complete financial stack to build your company. Scale with FDIC-insured bank accounts, debit and credit cards, and 3-click payment flows.
thanks
the UI looks pristine. Good idea to have a demo page