I guess 7h * 12%? The 7h and 12% are different numbers though.
We believe that for folks like me in my previous life Dart can save about 7h/wk. For example I spent several hours/wk writing changelogs, which I mostly don't have to do any more.
Separately, our users have reported an average of 12% savings, but I don't have the net number.
Either way, it will vary a lot by user--different people are going to have more/less time saved depending on how much their existing workflows overlap with what Dart can do for them!
Great question. We're taking an unorthodox approach here.
I don’t know of too many tools that are offering unlimited free calls to OpenAI, which means that all cool LLM-enabled features are price-gated or premium or otherwise limited. It's a bummer to restrict that value. Our bet is that LLM pricing will follow a Moore’s Law-style pattern, at least for a while, that will mean that we can offer better and cheaper LLM-enabled features over time. So in short, we're subsidizing some of the costs now on a longer-term bet.
That said, we can be smart about how we do things technically. We embed, compress, and omit stuff as much as possible to minimize tokens.
Also, we actually just completely fail to handle some things (something like reprioritizing a backlog of 10k tasks just wouldn't work for us right now) so we do hard cap some actions.
Really appreciate the feedback, doesn't come off grumpy at all. In fact I think it's pretty well in line with our vision. Beyond automated reports, we're just generally focused on saving users time/headache. The conflict between the people doing the project and the project manager is very, very common: the former doesn't want to spend time updating the tool, and the latter wants/needs centralized updates/status. In the future we absolutely plan to solve this better than we do now.
It's super compelling to hear about different pain points like this. The idea of automating acceptance criteria is indeed tough but absolutely possible to imagine. This is outcome-oriented in the best possible way!
Yep, this is one of our most popular features. That's exactly our goal--catch problems like this ahead of time. We're actually also working on other stuff for automatic backlog refinement but not ready yet.
If you get a chance to try, we'd love to hear how the duplicate detection stacks up against your expectations
Yeah, great question. This is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. Honestly probably worth a whole blog post/PG-style essay at some point. Shipping and iterating at top speed is honestly paramount for a startup.
Probably the biggest thing we've done has been to focus on hiring for people that can and will move quickly, and building a company culture around that. Our team is very strong, works unusually hard, and ships quickly at all costs. For a startup, I would recommend hiring startuppy people rather than engineers with 20y experience at the magnificent 7.
One of our most counterintuitive/provocative/potentially wrong practices has been to deemphasize automated tests. I'll probably catch a lot of flak for this but I think that spending a bunch of extra time writing thorough tests for something that will change next week when we iterate and improve is a waste of time. In my experience you can make up for this with thorough manual testing by someone (e.g. founder, product owner) that really, really cares about the product and UX. This is part of the overall "do things that don't scale" ethos and as the product has matured we have started to evolve to a higher level of test coverage. tl;dr I recommend less time spent engineering tests pre-PMF.
Otherwise we generally follow established best practices. Review fast, ship fast, roll forward. Extreme ownership and responsibility to ICs. Use Dart for project management to save time ;)
Overall, I think the first thing is most important: build a team and a culture that moves uncomfortably and unusually fast and breaks things (then fixes them immediately).
Yep, that makes a ton of sense. I totally see the value in building a portfolio like that.
Well, Dart can do a bit of the shorter-term weekly/monthly project reports/updates now, but I can definitely imagine adding 'full project summary for portfolio building' to the types of reports we can generate. Like you said, great for the team and a cool resource to hand off in deliverables if the owner wants to include as a success story.
Would love to chat more about some of these ideas--shoot me an email!
Loving the detailed product feedback, thanks so much. We'll process and take action to improve asap. Email also sounds great, support@ or zack@ whenever you like.
Sounds like HN was rate limiting you from posting all of your feedback? That's awesome hahaha
In short term, some quick thoughts
- Right now you only have one draft, and you can access it through the 'Resume draft' button in the top left
- We're planning to overhaul this accept/reject system for subtasks soon--a lot of the issues you're experiencing are very common, so we need to do better
- Also planning to improve onboarding flow there, thanks for the suggestion
- Not actually sure why you're being prevented from making that task, sorry for the trouble! We'll check it out right away. Tooltips are a great idea, we'll need to do more there
Just thinking some about your note about change orders. Honestly super interesting. We have been working on detailed audit history which I think can start to help here but really only scratches the surface of what you need to improve.
Also thinking more about
> show a report on the history of the projects' intent
This is a really interesting one and is actually part of where we started with Dart. When I was leading engineering at my last job I was in the habit of taking screenshots of our gantt every week or two so that I could manually flip through the photos and see how the timeline had evolved. Obviously there's no way that's the best solution there. We don't solve this right now but we plan to.
Yep, keeping tickets updated is one of the biggest problems with PM today and was part of the genesis for how I got started working on this. We do already have an integration with GitHub that will automatically sync updates, as well as an integration with Slack that helps users turn messages into tasks. The Slack one doesn't really do anything automated though, just helps the two systems talk when you want them to. The vision to connect all workspaces for seamless and automatic updates (like from Zoom calls as you mention) is something we’ve thought about and is quite appealing.
The biggest challenge with that is that every time we make an integration based on feedback or requests we see far less usage out of it than pretty much any other feature in the product. It turns out that people like to suggest tons of integrations but rarely take the time to set them up in practice. We can probably do a better job with that, and with giving more value to users sooner from the integrations.
Big picture, though, your vision totally aligns with ours: minimize (or zero out) the time that ICs need to spend updating stuff while maximizing the info available for PMs etc. in the tool. We plan to do a better and better job with this over time.
Some of the reporting, history, dashboards, templates, etc. that you mention is covered now but Dart probably isn't quite ready to solve some of your more advanced needs. It's all pretty aligned with our vision in the long run though. We're particularly excited about all of the ideas around resource tracking and allocation--we'll get there! Very curious to hear how it works for you.
What's your use case for
> a really well written portfolio completed projects
? Haven't heard this much before. Useful for an agency to showcase work?