I made a bot that asks “so what?”

A feature can be finished and still be difficult to explain to the people who are supposed to use it. Especially true if you build technical products that still need to speak to a more general audience. Engineering has the ticket, the release notes, and a perfectly reasonable description of what changed. Somewhere between that and the customer announcement, someone has to work out what any of it means for the person reading it.

That person might be a product manager, an engineering lead, a founder, or someone in customer support. They need to know who can use the thing, what's different for them, and whether they need to do anything. Sometimes those answers are in the notes. Sometimes you have to go back and ask the people who worked on the product.

I could have easily built a skill or had Hermes do something. However, I opted to build a a Grok Bot called So What?. Grok Bot is simple to use and the UX experience is impressive. Figured I should put my skills to use across the new products that keep coming during the age of AI. With this bot you paste a ticket, release note, or rough announcement, and it helps draft the customer explanation.

The name is also a reasonable question to ask of an AI tool. There are already plenty of tools that write things. When I started looking through the marketplace, I found bots that handle product positioning, preserve your voice, check claims, and explain their edits. “It writes better copy” was going to need some work as a reason for this one to exist.

So I gave it a narrower job. Before it rewrites anything, it needs to establish who's affected, what changes in their experience, where the feature is available, and what action they need to take. If the notes already cover that, it should get on with the draft. If something important is missing, it should ask the question that would change the message.

Here's a made-up example from the tests. A product is adding directory provisioning, which lets a company manage access through its existing employee directory. The release notes say it's available to Enterprise workspaces in the United States and Canada starting October 6. Other plans and regions aren't included, and an administrator needs to configure it.

You could make that sound very nice by saying the product now makes it easier to manage your team. You could also leave a reader on the wrong plan looking for a setting they can't use. The plan, location, date, and setup requirement are doing useful work in that explanation. Making it shorter doesn't make those details optional.

In that test, So What? kept the limits and the administrator's setup action. It also didn't ask for more information when the input was already enough. If I give an agent everything it needs, I don't want to fill out another form before it helps me.

The first set of tests I devised to learn from this covered five situations, including a performance change without measurements, a migration with a deadline, and an internal refactor with no customer effect. The saved test results recorded a pass for each. I can say it handled those cases as intended. Whether someone else finds it useful is the next thing to learn.

One adjustment came from trying sparse public release notes. The bot identified a missing fact and asked about it, but left the person without a draft to work on. The instructions now tell it to give a partial draft from the facts it has, make the gap visible, and explain what to find out next. There are still cases where the right answer is that there's no customer announcement to make. An internal cleanup can stay an internal cleanup.

Building this meant deciding what the bot should do when the information isn't quite enough. Someone still has to finish the job. I want the bot to help them see what's known, what's missing, and what they can use, without making up a benefit to complete the paragraph. Essentially, I'm also coaching the person to be build better product sense.

You can try So What? in Grok Bot. Bring a release note or a rough update that you're allowed to share, and treat what comes back as a draft for your review. Let me know how it went and what you still had to fix.