What is the key feature of a dev tool that would make you use it everyday?

Question

Hello PH community,

I am launching a new product that generates docstring thanks to AI and of course I want this to be a go to tool for developers in their daily coding life.

As an example: dogstring.ponicode.com
We first made it as a Github Action generating in bulk one line docstring.
Based on users feedback, we decided to add parameters to the docstring so there is more added value to our users
Finally we decided to have a online testing area so people can do it on a few functions instead of on their whole repo with Github Action...

But I think we didn't pinpoint what would make it a tool that people wants to use everyday.

I was wondering what are according to you the key feature to the dev tool you use everyday?

Paul Rasmussen · Accepted Answer

I think you should make something THAT HELPS PEOPLE MAKE SENSE OF CORE WEB VITALS. This will be a big topic as we move into and through 2021

Alejandro Cantarero · Answer

I’d say there are a few ways that developer tools become central to our processes.  The tool needs to do at least one of the following:

- Have a clear impact on a KPI
- Increase team productivity
- Have high visibility

I’ve used some tools that I really liked or found interesting, but never managed to check any of these boxes on the above list, and we eventually stopped using them.

KPI

A tool that impacts a key KPI doesn’t necessarily have to be sticky in the traditional sense.  For things like Application Performance Monitoring, we may not log in every day or week.  But every time we find a part of the application that can be improved that improves API response time, it’s a big win on a key metric.

Team Productivity

Really this should probably be a KPI, but since it can be a little harder to track empirically it is probably worth thinking about it separately.  Any tool that can help your team get more work done in a week is something people are going to want to use.

An example here for us has been something like Notion as a knowledge base.  We’ve seen the benefit when the team is able to go look up how to do some task that has been documented and didn’t get stuck waiting on an answer from someone else on “how do I do X?”.

High Visibility

Either you are

- Logging in to a web portal and using the tool on regular basis OR
- the tool is reaching you on some other platform you spend a lot of time (Slack, Github, Email…)

Really any tool that integrates with and posts messages to our code repositories or sends notifications to primary communication tools (like Slack) falls in this bucket for us.  It’s hard to ignore the value of something like Sentry/Rollbar or similar tools when you get constant notifications about things that are going wrong.

Similarly, annotations made to every PR/MR to our code repos really keep that tool high visibility in our development process.  An example of something we use in this category are Code Climate’s code quality checks.

What is the key feature of a dev tool that would make you use it everyday?

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