How Prisma leveraged Kapa.ai to enhance developer experience and scale support

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THE SITUATION

A growing user base makes scaling developer experience challenging

Prisma makes building data-driven apps faster, simpler, and more efficient through great Data DX. At its core, Prisma provides an open-source, next-generation Node.js and TypeScript ORM that unlocks a new level of developer experience thanks to its intuitive data model, migrations, type-safety, and auto-completion. Prisma Accelerate and Prisma Pulse extend this experience to make building with data even easier, with a simple global database cache, real-time capabilities, and more.

As of 2023, Prisma has a growing community of hundreds of thousands of developers, over 34,000 GitHub stars, and a team of 45 dedicated to delivering excellent developer experience.

Being open-source comes with a ton of benefits for Prisma, but also presents a challenge in the form of a lot of developers asking questions. For example, Prisma gets 100+ new open GitHub issues every month, has an active Discord server with 2,900+ members and receives hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to their documentation site. In an ideal world, the team would be able to provide 1:1 tailored support to all their users, but given the open-source nature that becomes too infeasible at that scale. So the Prisma team reached out to kapa with the aim of exploring the deployment of custom trained  LLMs to improve product adoption and developer experience without the need to scale their customer and user support team.

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THE SOLUTION

An LLM-powered chatbot trained on Prisma knowledge sources

Prisma and kapa partnered up to create a custom LLM that has (1) access to a treasure trove of knowledge sources curated by the Prisma team and community, and is (2) deployed where the Prisma community has questions

1. Knowledge Sources

Kapa has access to the following Prisma resources and is kept up to date on a weekly basis:

• Hundreds pages of developer documentation, technical blog posts and guides

• Over 5000 GitHub issues and Open PRs

• Hundreds of forum posts from GitHub Discussions

• Over 500 YouTube tutorials and video guides

2. Deployment Methods

Kapa is deployed in two places, the (a) Prisma documentation site, and the (b) Prisma Discord community.

(a) Prisma Documentation Site

Users can now click on the “Ask AI” button on the bottom right of the Prisma docs and ask kapa a question. To deploy this, the Prisma team customized the off-the-shelf widget integration and was able to go live in less than an hour.

Check out the integration live on the docs site here (click “Ask AI” on bottom right corner): https://www.prisma.io/docs

(b) Prisma Discord Community

Prisma recently added Discord to their list of platforms where users can congregate and engage with the Prisma team. Kapa is deployed on this Discord community. Community members can ask kapa questions in the #ask-ai channel and find meaningful responses that unblocks them and helps them move forward in their journey towards adopting Prisma products in their own applications.

Check out the Prisma Discord and kapa integration live here:  https://pris.ly/discord

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THE RESULTS

Kapa.ai handles more than +10k Prisma developer questions every month

After going live in 2023, Kapa now answers +10k developer questions every month for the team across Prisma deployments. This creates a number of benefits for the team.

• Increased Product Adoption: Kapa has enabled the Prisma team to continue innovating in ways to grow their community and user base, with Head of Developer Connections, Petra Donka, commenting that Kapa has been “a game-changer in enhancing the developer experience, fostering a deeper trust in our brand, and accelerating the adoption of our product”.

• Improved Developer Experience & Product Adoption: Prisma users have been tweeting out about their experiences saying things like “Prisma uses kapa for their docs and it’s dope” and “all other tools should take a page out of Prisma’s book”.

• Instant 24/7 Multilingual Support: With more than 20% of questions and answers being in languages other than English, Prisma can now cater to a wider range of users and provide a more inclusive support experience.

Furthermore, the kapa.ai team themselves uses Prisma to power the kapa platform, as they needed a solution that was fast and flexible allowing them to make quick adjustments based on customer feedback on the fly. So the process of optimizing kapa.ai for Prisma was in many ways also a process of helping Prisma help the kapa.ai team as end-users of their ORM.

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SUMMARY

Prisma's integration with kapa.ai has effectively scaled up support for developers, offering quick and relevant answers to their queries. This collaboration has improved user experience and product adoption. If you're interested in a similar solution for efficient developer support, you can request access to kapa.ai here.