Improving VI with Cool Internal Tools
Jonathan Kressaty
Welcome new (and returning) users! For those who are seeing this for the first time, we send a daily email with updates on our progress and this is the 8th update. You can reply directly to this message to discuss ways VI can improve with the founders, and we hope you do!
REMINDER: Threading is VI’s most powerful feature
Threading your replies helps VI continue the conversation. After getting your first response to a message, click “reply” to continue the thread – VI will respond based on the full context of your previous messages in that thread. This makes it easy to have VI continue doing work, or provide you with more results, after you’ve made a request.
VI is like ChatGPT, but VI reads the internet, email, your browser history… and Slack!
Internal Tooling
We’ve talked a lot about the awesome things VI can do – today we want to show you how we’re working on making VI even better. When we work on VI locally on our machines, we use a development tool to analyze what went well (or not so well):
This lets us see exactly what the language model extracts from your message as well as which of our “skills” it uses to send you a response.
We can also see the requests we make to OpenAI when we want to turn a bunch of text results into a nicely-formatted answer:
Are you interested in working with us to develop tools like this? Reply to this email and tell us about yourself!
What’s New
- Slack! Search it! Summarize it!
- White screen on mobile is now fixed (we know this was very annoying)
- Improved understanding of the “intent” of your query should help VI give better results in general
- New internal tooling is letting us improve VI by seeing each step of VI’s “thinking” – from classifying the intent of your question to formatting results
- Minor bug fixes to login and signup (you’ll be redirected to your chat if you’re already logged in)
What’s Next
- We’re working hard on improving “app” search, specifically around finding the best items from your Slack/Email/Browsing that are relevant to the question you ask VI