Mintlify, a company that automates software documentation processes, received a seed financing of $2.8 million funded by Bain Capital Ventures. The revenues will go into product development and double the company's employees, according to Han Wang, the CEO of a software business. Mintlify is now a three-person team.
Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee started the New York-based software startup in late 2021. They studied at Cornell University and are both software engineers, and it was their profession that inspired them to create Mintlify. They created Mintlify as a follow-up to an earlier project called Figstack, which claimed to explain code, answer questions about it, calculate time complexity (the number of times a statement executes), and translate code between programming languages.
They got their motivation from their experiences working in software development, where they had to deal with documentation that wasn't always thorough or of the greatest quality. Their findings corroborate a 2017 GitHub poll that revealed 93 percent of developers view poor or outdated documentation to be a widespread issue. According to them, documentation is crucial for engineers and for those working on new codebases.
“We’ve worked as software engineers at companies in all stages ranging from startups to big tech and found that they all suffer from bad documentation, if it even existed at all,” Wang informed TechCrunch in an email interview. “Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and those jumping into new codebases. It helps senior devs save time from explaining their code to others in the future. For public-facing and open-source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption.” Mintlify was developed to solve documentation problems by automatically producing documentation. Using technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and web scraping, the software scans code and generates docs to explain it with the help of technologies.
This simply demonstrates that artificial intelligence can be used to generate documentation from code.
Mintlify Writer is a Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IntelliJ extension that uses AI to automatically document code. The documentation on GitHub states, "We never store your code but code does leave your machine."
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Rust, Dart, and Go are among the supported languages.
However, Mintlify is not the first to do so. In fact, the software company already has a few competitors who are following in its footsteps. Nonetheless, Wang claims that their software produces higher-quality results and that they do not require developers to host documentation on the cloud service.
"Mintlify's mission is to solve documentation rot by developing continuous documentation into a standard practice for software teams," Wang stated.
Aside from document generation, the software checks for outdated documentation and monitors how users interact with it. These contribute to its readability. The software will not save any code and will encrypt all user data in transit and at rest. Developers can use the platform for free, and it can be integrated with existing systems.
However, it is still early in the game, and the AI will undoubtedly improve. Mintlify Writer appears to be suitable for organizations that need developers to describe code as they write it, yet it is possible to clog code with comments that proclaim the obvious while providing little useful information. The disadvantage is that relying too heavily on a tool like this (like with GitHub Copilot) might have a detrimental influence or even result in erroneous documentation.
