“Unblocked is the API for our organization's context.”

Expo is an agentic mobile infrastructure company that offers open source tools and cloud services for building, shipping, and maintaining mobile apps. Eleven years in, Brent Vatne, Expo's VP of Engineering, describes the company as “an agentic mobile infrastructure company”: the tools to build an app, verify it, monitor it, and keep improving it with agents.

That much history also creates a practical problem. Important decisions are scattered across years of Slack conversations, GitHub issues and pull requests, Linear tickets, Notion documents, and production systems. The people who need that information are often looking for it for very different reasons.

Engineering wants to understand why the code works the way it does. Support needs enough context to answer a customer without pulling an engineer away from their work. Product needs to know what changed across the company. New hires need to understand decisions that may have been made years before they joined.

All of them use the same underlying context through Unblocked.

“I see Unblocked as the API for our organization's context,” Brent said. “We happen to use it through an MCP, a CLI, and a Slack bot, but there are so many other ways to plug it into different workflows.”

The challenge: 11 years of answers spread across a dozen places#

Expo did not have a shortage of information. The problem was finding the right information when someone needed it.

The team spans North America, Europe, India, Taiwan, and Brazil. A question that comes up in Vancouver might depend on a decision made years ago by someone who is asleep on the other side of the world. And even when the answer has been written down, it may be buried in an old Slack thread, a closed GitHub issue, a Notion page, or several of those places at once.

“If it's the afternoon for me in Vancouver, that could be four or five in the morning in Taiwan, and the information I need might live in the head of one of our engineers there,” Brent said. “Before Unblocked, we either had to wait or wade through large amounts of information to find what we were looking for.”

For Jon Samp, Expo's Head of Product, keeping up with the company had become a job of its own.

“Updates happen in Slack, Linear, Notion, and GitHub by different people every hour,” he said. “Things would start on a Monday and I'd still be waiting for answers on Friday. I'd spend four to eight hours a week just gathering context before I felt I could be effective at my job.”

Support ran into a slightly different version of the same problem. Documentation could explain how something was supposed to work without capturing the Slack conversation or issue that explained what was actually happening.

“You don't know what you don't know,” says Sarah Lane, Expo's founding support engineer. “I would answer something from the docs only to find out later there was a repo issue or a Slack thread that held the real story. Once I had Unblocked, the difference wasn't that the answers got easier to write. It's that I stopped missing context.”

Getting the answer means understanding what changed#

Simply connecting an AI tool to GitHub, Slack, Linear, Notion, Sentry, and Datadog would not solve Expo's problem. Someone still has to work out which information matters, which decisions are current, and what changed over time.

That is the part Expo relies on Unblocked for. It pulls together information from across those systems and uses the history between them to answer questions based on the current state of the organization, rather than treating everything it finds as equally valid.

“The quality of the answers is good. It does this over eleven years of data and still gives me what is true today, compared to what was true six, seven, or eight years ago,” Brent said. “It consolidates the context, adds that temporal element, and resolves conflicting takes. I don't have to think about any of that.”

Sarah sees the same thing when she is investigating support tickets. A recent Slack conversation may only make sense in light of an issue from months earlier, or an old issue may have been resolved in a way that changes how a current customer problem should be handled.

“It really digs deep into Slack threads and connects conversations: someone spoke about this last week, but they also spoke about it four months ago, and here's what changed between those dates,” she said. “It goes through closed issues and tells me what the resolution was then and how it affects the customer's situation now. Things that would have taken me so much longer to find, it finds in seconds.”

“It consolidates the context, adds that temporal element, and resolves conflicting takes. I don't have to think about any of that.”

Brent Vatne — VP of Engineering, Expo

Support: solving more tickets before they reach engineering#

Expo's developer success inbox covers everything from failed iOS builds and billing questions to bug reports and product questions. The person answering the ticket often needs information from several parts of the company to understand what happened.

Before Unblocked, that regularly meant searching other systems or asking an engineer for help, then waiting for a response across time zones.

Now an agent Sarah built reviews the support queue first. It decides which tickets need more context, calls Unblocked over MCP, and adds what it finds to the ticket before a person responds. About 40% of tickets are routed through it.

“Unblocked adds a note to the ticket with context: here's what we've observed based on all the available data, and we've queried our backend to flesh it out,” Brent said. “It might say this person's issue was related to this Slack conversation, which has been resolved, and we've confirmed they had a successful build a day later. That saves a massive amount of time and lets the team focus on the questions that need real care and attention.”

The agent's rules live in a CLAUDE.md file, and wiring Unblocked into it took almost no time.

“It was wildly simple to implement,” she said. “I'm not super skilled at backend logs, and Unblocked is much better at it than me. It surfaces errors in seconds that would have taken me a long time digging through the UI.”

The biggest benefit is not eliminating escalation altogether. It is making sure engineers are only pulled in when the problem actually needs an engineer.

“The biggest change is that an engineer's day stays their day,” Sarah said. “Every escalation costs more than the time it takes to answer. It takes someone out of deep work, and the recovery cost is larger than the interruption itself. Now the tickets I escalate are real engineering problems. When I ping someone, they know it's worth their attention.”

Because Unblocked includes citations with its answers, Sarah can verify the underlying evidence before responding to a customer.

“It's my name behind the response, and I'm the one held accountable,” she said. “Unblocked shows every citation, so I can review it myself. I find discrepancies that way too: something outdated that needs updating, especially if it's customer facing. And I can pass the citation right to the customer so they can see where I'm drawing my conclusion from.”

“I'm not looking for something plausible. I'm looking for something I can put in front of a customer and stand behind.”

Sarah Lane — Founding Support Engineer, Expo

Product: keeping up without spending Monday catching up#

Jon used to spend four to eight hours each week gathering enough information to understand what had changed across the company.

He replaced much of that work with an Unblocked workflow that reviews product documents and activity across Slack, Linear, Notion, and GitHub, then shows him the updates that matter along with links back to the original conversations.

“Every week Unblocked walks through my product docs, gathers information from Slack, Linear, Notion, and GitHub, and tells me where things have been updated,” he said. “I don't have to read through a mountain of notifications. It gives me real links to the real conversations, and I get zoomed into the relevant part of a Slack thread that's a hundred messages deep.”

That has changed what he spends his time on.

“Unblocked has solved 90% of the context gathering for me,” Jon said. “Context gathering means context switching, which is mentally hard. With that time back we've spun up new projects and I've gotten to do more IC work. That simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.”

It has also made information from the codebase useful to people who would never normally open GitHub. During a recent customer call, for example, someone asked whether a requested feature had shipped. Unblocked found the pull request that had merged the previous day, giving the sales team an answer immediately.

“People who aren't on GitHub usually wouldn't get that information except through someone like me, which creates a bottleneck,” Jon said. “I was on a call with a customer yesterday. They asked if a feature they requested had merged. Unblocked brought up the actual PR, merged the day before, and our sales team was able to tell them about it. That would never have been possible before.”

For Jon, the references matter as much as the answer itself. He can use an LLM to help make sense of what happened without losing the connection to the people, conversations, documents, and code where the underlying information came from.

“LLMs are non-deterministic. They come up with things you didn't think of, but they also make stuff up: links, URL parameters that don't exist,” he said. “Unblocked adds real links and references to things that actually happened. My thoughts are still provoked, but then I can zoom into the real sources. The people in your company are the ones who know things. They wrote them down, and Unblocked makes the LLM show you what they wrote.”

“The people in your company are the ones who know things. They wrote them down, and Unblocked makes the LLM show you what they wrote.”

Jon Samp — Head of Product, Expo

Engineering: giving coding agents the history behind the code#

Expo's engineers also use Unblocked from their coding agents when the code itself is not enough to explain why something works the way it does.

Over the last 90 days, Expo's agents made more than 2,500 calls to Unblocked from Claude Code, Codex, Claude Desktop, and Cursor. Monthly MCP volume grew 38x between May and September.

The pattern is simple: let the coding agent work normally, but have it check Unblocked when it encounters something unusual, needs to understand the history behind a decision, or wants more context before reviewing a change.

“You can give the agent its task and say, if you come across something that seems unusual, double check the history with Unblocked to see why it was done that way,” Brent said. “For adversarial reviews, consult Unblocked for more context. It gives agents more information without slowing them down. It's so much conceptually simpler to know you have this one tool that's the source of your context across all the others, and it links you to the specific sources if you need to go deeper.”

Brent uses Unblocked the same way when he contributes code himself. As VP of Engineering, he is not working in the codebase every day, so understanding the team's current conventions and the reasoning behind them matters before he opens a pull request.

“As VP of Engineering I'm not in the codebase every day, but when I do want to contribute, I don't want to do it in a way that's incompatible with what the team is doing, that ignores the discussions they've had or their coding standards,” he said. “Unblocked makes it easier to go in and contribute without it feeling like a drive-by, bolt-on pull request.”

The Slack integration handles another common interruption. When someone asks a question, Unblocked can answer immediately and let the people closest to the topic confirm or add detail when necessary.

“Anytime someone asks a question, it jumps in with an answer, and quite often it's the correct one,” Brent said. “The people most familiar with that area can confirm it or add a clarifying detail. They don't feel the need to respond to everything right away. They can stay focused.”

Expo is now taking the same approach with its own code review agent. Rather than building another system to search years of GitHub history, the agent can ask Unblocked for the relevant context.

“If we want that agent to be familiar with the whole history of issues and PRs on the repo, and to pull on that quickly and efficiently, it only makes sense to use Unblocked rather than hitting the GitHub API and sorting through everything ourselves,” Brent said.

“It gives agents more information without slowing them down. You have this one tool that's the source of your context across all the others.”

Brent Vatne — VP of Engineering, Expo

Onboarding: learning the company without reading the entire company#

Rami Maalouf joined Expo's developer relations team in June. At previous companies, onboarding meant spending his first couple of weeks reading old Slack conversations and trying to work out which ones mattered.

That approach does not scale particularly well at a 70-person company with years of history.

“Unblocked filtered out the noise and let me focus on what mattered for my role,” he said. “It saved me at least ten hours in the first month, and realistically closer to twenty.”

Having that context also changed the questions he asked his new coworkers.

“Instead of asking broad questions I could have found answers to, I get the context first and ask the right questions when I meet someone,” Rami said. “That leads to much more thoughtful conversations.”

And before starting new work, he could check whether somebody else had already explored the same idea.

“Before I proposed a video idea, I checked with Unblocked: has anyone thought of this before?” Rami said. “It surfaced a document Jon had created about a video he'd already started working on. I did not expect that. So I talked to Jon and we built on what the team already had.”

Brent sees the same effect with other new hires. Many of the questions they have are about decisions made long before most current employees joined the company.

“A lot of these questions can't be answered by people who've been here a year or two when the organization has been around for ten. Why is this done this way? Nobody knows unless they were around seven years ago,” he said. “New hires tell us that compared to onboarding at other roles, it's just so much easier with Unblocked.”

There is also a smaller but important cultural effect. People can ask basic questions without worrying about interrupting someone or revealing that they do not know something.

“[For new hires] there was a lot of self-censorship of questions. I don't want to ask this because I'll look bad, or I've already asked this person too many questions,” Brent said. “Unblocked eliminates that concern. If you're curious about something, you can just ask, and you'll get a good answer and direction on where to dig deeper.”

“For new hires there was a lot of self-censorship of questions. Unblocked eliminates that. If you're curious about something, you can just ask.”

Brent Vatne — VP of Engineering, Expo

More than a tool for coding agents#

If another engineering leader asked Brent about Unblocked specifically as a way to give coding agents better context, his answer would be yes. But that is only part of how Expo uses it.

“If a VP of Engineering asked me whether this is a good way to give agents context so they're more efficient and produce better output, I'd say yes,” he said. “But I'd also say look at how else it can be used across the organization: helping people answer questions and improving the shared understanding of the company, the business, the processes, everything.”

Today the same context is used by support agents, product workflows, coding agents, a Slack bot, engineers, and new hires. The interface changes depending on the job, but the underlying company knowledge does not.

Sarah describes the alternative in simpler terms: without Unblocked, the work goes back to searching several systems manually, checking the answer yourself, or responding with less confidence.

“If Unblocked disappeared, the searching I do in one step would go back to three or four steps across different tools. The bigger loss would be confidence,” Sarah said. “Without it I'm either verifying everything myself or hedging. One is slow, the other is vague, and both are worse for the customer.”

“I see Unblocked as the API for our organization's context. We happen to use it through an MCP, a CLI, and a Slack bot, but there are so many other ways to plug it into different workflows.”

Brent Vatne — VP of Engineering, Expo

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