With the world still working out the limits of LLMs and ever more powerful models being released each month, it’s a little hard to know where to begin. Whether it’s summarising and generating text, building a useful chat assistant, or comparing the relatedness of strings with embeddings, almost all of this now can be done via a few simple API calls. It has never been easier to incorporate these new technologies into your own product.

Like most things, our AI Assistant started out as an idea. One of our data scientists, Ed, was working with our customers to improve our existing insights. But the most common theme that kept surfacing was the wide-range of use cases that our customers wanted to use insights for. Using this user feedback as our inspiration, we came up with the idea of a natural language assistant that you can use to explore your incident data.

This week was a particularly exciting one for us at incident.io. We launched not one, not two, but four AI-powered features to help folks get the most out of their incidents. In this episode of The Debrief, we sit down with Ed Dean, Product Analyst, and Charlie Revett, Product Engineer, to talk through all of these features and discuss how they're already making a measurable impact. You'll also hear them talk about: You can learn more about our AI features here.

Since the advent of ChatGPT, companies have been racing to build AI features into their product. Previously, if you wanted AI features you needed to hire a team of specialists to build machine learning models in-house. But now that OpenAI’s models are an API call away, the investment required to build shiny AI has never been lower. We were one of those companies. Here’s our journey to building our first AI feature, and some practical advice if you’ll be doing the same.

One of the most painful parts of incident management is keeping on top of the many things that happen when you’re right in the middle of an incident. From figuring out and communicating what’s happening, to ensuring you learn from previous incidents, and even capturing the right actions – incidents are hard, but they don’t need to be this hard.

As we’ve talked about before, our app is a monolith: all our backend code lives together and gets compiled into a single binary. One of the reasons I prefer monolithic architectures is that they make it much easier to focus on shipping features without having to spend much time thinking about where code should live and how to get all the data you need together quickly. However, I’m not going to claim there aren’t disadvantages too. One of those is compile times.

2023 at incident.io was a year to remember. While it's easy to be cyclical about proclaiming that every year was better than the last, a few things stand out that made 2023 truly a year for the books. TL;DR, a lot happened! Especially when you consider that a lot of things didn't make the list above. So as we turn the page to 2024, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the transformative year that was 2023, not only for us but our customers as well.

Whenever you're providing a service to businesses or individuals that they rely on, it's important to make sure that it's up and running as much as possible without disruptions. But the reality is that, despite your best efforts, downtime does happen. Regardless of when incidents strike, whether it’s 2 PM in the middle of the working day or 2 AM, it's important to have people available to diagnose and resolve issues as soon as possible.

All incident.io developers are given a MacBook which they use for their development work. That meant when Apple released the M3 MacBook Pros in October, people naturally started asking questions like “wow, how much more productive might I be if my laptop looked that good?” and “perhaps we’d be more secure if our machines were Space Black 🤔” Pete’s (our CTO) response to this was “if you can prove it’s worthwhile, we’ll do it”

What a year 2023 was at incident.io! While it's hard to summarize 365 days into just a few sentences, a handful of moments stood out from this transformative year: So as we close the curtain on a momentous 2023, we sat down with the three co-founders of incident.io—Chris, Stephen, and Pete—to do a bit of reflection on the wild ride that was this year.