A Year of Unblocking Engineering Teams

Dennis Pilarinos

September 26, 2024

This time last year, Unblocked launched in an open beta with the goal of making developers more productive by providing helpful and accurate answers to questions about their codebase.

We envision a world where, by connecting to the systems you use to build your application, we could build a platform that helps you understand the nuances and specifics of your codebase — how it works, why it was written, and why it works the way it does.

Unblocked began with a number of powerful features out of the gate:

The ability to connect a wide range of sources, including GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Linear, Notion, Google Drive, and more.
Unblocked clients that meet developers where they already work:
- A conversational UI where developers can get detailed and nuanced answers about their application, along with cited sources that can be easily consulted for deeper exploration.
- IDE extensions that surface past Pull Requests, discussions, and documents for specific files and lines of code.
- A powerful integration with Slack that provides answers to questions asked in channels, helping the engineering team and their cross-functional partners.
A security model built to meet the strictest requirements, enabling the most security-conscious companies to trust Unblocked with their data.

As we’ve worked with the growing number of teams who use Unblocked, we’ve also added several new features requested by our users, including:

Data Shield - enabling Unblocked to respect the access controls for connected data sources - so answers only include the information a user has access to in a given system.
Roles-based access control - allowing adminstrators to manage which users can take which actions (like adding/removing data sources) within Unblocked.
Support for multiple, concurrent source code providers - enabling teams who use multiple source code providers, or even multiple organizations within the same source code provider to connect all their repositories to Unblocked.
A standalone mac app that offers a focused and centralized place to ask questions, get answers, and view your past queries.
The Unblocked API, which can be used to create custom integrations, organize and upload documents, and retrieve references that have been archived by your users.

We’ve also dramatically expanded the kinds of questions you can ask Unblocked about - from getting information about the status of open issues to summarizations of conversations in Slack channels, and more. Unlike many generic AI tools, Unblocked is able to provide a quality and breadth of answers that are customized to your systems specifically.

What We’ve Learned (so far)

Missing context is a universal challenge

As developers ourselves, we know that the biggest challenge in software development isn’t writing code—it’s having enough context to know what code to write.

For engineering teams with large codebases and scattered documentation, it can take hours, if not days, to understand the history behind a specific part of your application. And this challenge is only amplified for new hires who don’t have an understanding of where to look for answers in the first place.

When engineers can’t get the context they need, projects are delayed, costly regressions are introduced into the codebase, and everyone feels like they’re wasting time. No developer likes working this way.

We’re solving a real and expensive problem

During our open beta we’ve sought feedback on how Unblocked helps teams of all sizes, and in particular, we’ve dug into the ways in which using Unblocked makes developers more productive.

Not only do developers who use Unblocked say that it reduces interruptions and gives them accurate answers about their application — they report that we save them 1-2 hours per day (read more about how we save time for the team at Drata). This time was previously spent searching for context about their codebase, either in Slack, across tools, or directly in their source code system. Given that sixty-three percent of developers spend more than 30 minutes a day looking for the information they need to do their jobs, we continue to believe we are solving a real and expensive problem for engineering teams.

We’ve also seen a number of use cases where Unblocked is particularly helpful for software development teams, including onboarding new developers, conquering legacy code, and supporting cross-functional teams.

We’re flattered by the kind words our users have said about us:

<blockquote class="small"> “Unblocked empowers every developer with the insight once reserved for the seasoned few. This is the best application of AI’s potential in enhancing developer proficiency, making developers themselves more effective — rather than typing for them.” </blockquote>

<blockquote class="small"> “Unblocked is the first app that can actually bring together knowledge from the tools that I use and make it available to me through natural conversation. I can’t imagine a future without a tool like this.” </blockquote>

<blockquote class="small"> “Unblocked is a game changer in how easy it is to use and the quality of the results shows how much context it carries automatically. Using it for the past few weeks is literally 10x’ing my productivity.” </blockquote>

This is only the start

Next week, we’re making things official by removing the beta label from Unblocked and launching our paid plans - not to mention a number of new features that are coming over the next few months.

We’ll also be heading out to meet our community at GitHub Universe and QCon in San Francisco, and apidays in Paris. Stop by our booth to grab a t-shirt, some stickers, and meet the Unblocked team.

Over the next month, we’ll be sharing more here on our blog about how you and your team can use Unblocked. Stay tuned for those posts.

And if you haven’t started using Unblocked yet, what are you waiting for?