Show HN: We added ChatGPT to our documentation to make them fully portable
xata.io
Hello HN. I'm a designer over at Xata. We build a serverless database platform on top of Postgres and Elastic-like search that provides goodies like a native TypeScript client for type support in your IDE. Long story short, we're trying to bundle all the normal stuff you need out of a database along with branching, so you don't have to glue everything together.
Today we added a new /ask/ endpoint to our search product that bundles in ChatGPT support into any stored data. Why would you want this, you might ask? Fantastic question. Let's say you have a bunch of documentation stored in OpenAPI with a jumble of random markdown files in a Github repo. Sound familiar? With Xata you could push that content into a Xata DB on publish, and immediately get text and vector based search against that content. The new /ask/ endpoint only needs some rules, and suddenly you have natural language responses. Because it's all just markdown, you can then render the response back in your documentation site with syntax highlighting and all that goodness.
Ok yeah, yeah. Docs chat. I get it. What makes this really cool is that because the content is now in a database, along with those endpoints, our documentation is suddenly portable. We can now provide helpful links throughout the product that ask "How do search boosts work?" that can answer things inline without linking you somewhere. We're still kicking the tires on this stuff, but it's nice to get the authoring experience of writing markdown in Github repos and seeing it suddenly show up anywhere, not just a static website. Obviously there's more you can do with it than this docs uses case, but it's the one we wanted to build for ourselves.
Here's a 5-minute video that explains the basics along with some other resources if you want to build something similar yourself.
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbH9OHXvok0
The new ask endpoint
https://xata.io/docs/api-reference/db/db_branch_name/tables/...
A deeper technical dive on how this works
https://xata.io/blog/chatgpt-on-your-data
A starter repo with examples against Pokemon!
https://github.com/xataio/examples/tree/main/apps/sample-cha...