Onri AI
p/onri-ai
Find the expert in your team, now
Chentai Kao
Onri AI — Find the expert in your team, now
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Onri AI is a people search engine that finds the expert for you whenever you ask "Who knows about ...?" Get immediate help without asking around aimlessly. Cut through silo knowledge with zero maintenance from your team.
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Chentai Kao
Hello hunters! I built Onri AI to answer this question: "How to find someone in my company who knows about XYZ?" By connecting your company's Git and Jira, you'll have a search engine ready to answer "who knows about ...?", with zero maintenance required from your team. A few years ago, I worked as a software engineer in a FAANG company that had thousands of engineers. I noticed that, whenever my work involved something out of my immediate team's scope, it's nearly impossible to know the right person to reach out to. I'd ask my manager: "hey, do you know who worked on this old feature XYZ?". If I'm lucky, that question would be forwarded to other managers and directors and, days later, reached the exact engineer who worked on it. If I'm in bad luck, the email thread went nowhere and I was left alone digging up old code and documents. The scenario above occurred frequently in various shapes: 1. When I start on a project and I need to set up a new server --> "Who can grant me access to a new server?" 2. I picked up an old feature --> "Who can give me a quick knowledge dump on the system design from 5 years ago?" 3. My server log showed an error stack trace from api.phoenix.messaging... --> "Who worked on this internal messaging API called Phoenix?" There are many potential solutions: 1. Documentation: this is usually my first step but only if the documentation exists and is up-to-date, which is rarely the case. 2. Git blame: useful if I know which code I should be reading, but it's very time consuming when all I need is a high-level system design walk-through. 3. Ask around: this is what I usually do, and it's a hit or miss depending on my manager's work connection. 4. Force everyone to keep a work log and search that: doable but it comes with very high maintenance cost. Given that many engineers work with Git and some ticketing system (Jira, Asana, etc), I think it's possible to establish the organization knowledge of "who worked on what" for the entire company simply by looking at all Git history and tickets. I ended up building it as an internal tool in that FAANG company, and it worked! The search results were amazing, and I no longer needed those long email threads to find some team I hadn't even heard of. Got hundreds of daily users. That's why I'm building Onri AI, as I think many teams out there would also find it useful! I chose the name Onri because this tool breaks down tribal knowledge, and if you squint hard enough the Onri logo looks like the process to tear down walls within a company, visually starting out with 4 walls, then 3 walls, then 2, then 1. I hope you enjoy it, and I'm open to any feedback! If you got questions, please leave a comment or reach me at support@onri.ai