Ask AI: Quick Start Guide
Get instant answers about your engineering data - right inside Slack or your Typo Dashboard.
1. What is Ask AI?
Ask AI is Typo's built-in assistant. It lets you ask plain-English questions about your team's engineering data: pull requests, sprints, deployments, code quality, AI coding tool usage, and more; and get a clear, instant answer. No dashboards to dig through and no reports to build. Just ask, like you would ask a colleague.
2. Where Can You Use It?
Ask AI is available in two places:
Slack (Direct Message): Send a private message to the Typo app in Slack, just like messaging a teammate.
Slack (In a Channel): @mention the Typo app in any channel or thread (e.g., “@Typo how many PRs did we merge this week?”).
Typo Dashboard: Use the Ask AI chat panel directly inside your Typo Dashboard.
Each conversation remembers what you've discussed so far, so you can ask natural follow-up questions; for example, asking “What about last month?” right after asking about this month's numbers.
3. What Can You Ask About?
Here are the kinds of questions Ask AI can help with, organized by topic:
Pull Requests & Code Reviews
“How many PRs did the Backend team merge last month?”
“What's our average PR cycle time, and where's it getting stuck: coding, review, or merge?”
“Were any PRs merged without a code review this sprint?”
Sprints & Jira Tickets
“Show me the burndown for our current sprint.”
“Which tickets are at risk of missing this sprint?”
“What's on John’s plate this sprint?”
Deployments & Release Health (DORA Metrics)
“What's our deployment frequency this quarter?”
“What's our change failure rate?”
CI/CD Pipelines
“How long do our builds typically take?”
“Which pipelines fail most often?”
Code Quality & Security
“How many security issues are currently open across our repos?”
“Which repo has the most code-quality issues?”
“How many issues have we fixed this month compared to last month?”
Incidents
“How many incidents did we open and close last month?”
“What's our average time to resolve an incident?”
AI Coding Tool Usage (Copilot / Cursor)
“What percentage of our developers are actively using Cursor?”
“Who are our power users versus light users of AI tools?”
Team Performance & Risk
“Which teams are showing elevated delivery or quality risk right now?”
“Give me some talking points for my 1:1 with Jane.”
Engineering Investment
“How is our engineering time split between new features, tech debt, and bug fixes this month?”
Goals & Alerts
“Which of our metric goals are on track, and which have been missed?”
General “How Do We Calculate This?” Questions
“How is Change Failure Rate calculated?”
“What counts as PR cycle time in Typo?”
4. Tips for Getting Great Answers
Be specific. Mention a team, person, project, or date range for the most precise answer; e.g., “PRs merged by the Payments team in August” rather than just “PRs.”
Ask one thing at a time. Ask AI handles focused questions best; break up multi-part questions if an answer feels incomplete.
Ask for more. Lists are kept short by default to stay easy to read; just ask “show me more” or “the full list” if you need it.
Keep threads reasonably focused. In a very long back-and-forth, Ask AI may lose track of the earliest parts of the conversation. If that happens, briefly restate what you need or start a fresh conversation.
Give it a moment. Questions that pull together several data points can take a few extra seconds to answer.
5. What Ask AI Won't Do
It only knows about engineering and Typo data. General knowledge, personal advice, or anything unrelated to your team's engineering metrics is out of scope. Ask AI will politely redirect you back to what it can help with.
It only shows you what you're allowed to see. Access follows your role in Typo; Admins can see org-wide data, while Managers see data for the teams they manage. You'll never see another team's or another organization's data through Ask AI.
It looks and reports, it doesn't act. Ask AI can retrieve and explain data, but it cannot create tickets, send notifications, trigger deployments, or change any settings on your behalf.
It won't guess. If there isn't enough data to answer confidently, Ask AI will say so or ask a clarifying question rather than make something up.
It stays neutral. Ask AI reports facts and figures; it won't offer personal opinions or judgments about your team, tools, or process.
6. Getting Help
If you run into anything Ask AI can't resolve, or have questions about rolling it out to your team, reach out to the Typo support team.
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