Why Prompter
In theater, the prompter sits just offstage with the script and quietly feeds the line to anyone who blanks mid-scene. That’s the role: the script is the Cratis documentation, the stage is the community Discord, and when someone forgets their line - “wait, how do I append an event again?” - Prompter whispers it back, with citations.
The problem
Section titled “The problem”Most questions asked in a developer community are already answered in the documentation - the asker just doesn’t know where, and the humans who do know aren’t always awake. Without help, every such question costs twice: the asker waits, and a maintainer spends attention on something the docs already cover. The questions that genuinely need human judgment queue up behind the ones that don’t.
What Prompter changes
Section titled “What Prompter changes”The documentation answers first. Questions with a documented answer get one in seconds, with source links, in the channel where they were asked. Humans keep the interesting ones. And because Prompter logs what it couldn’t answer, every miss becomes a signal for what documentation to write next - the bot pays the docs back.
Why it only answers from the documentation
Section titled “Why it only answers from the documentation”A community bot that guesses is worse than no bot: a confidently wrong code snippet costs more time than an unanswered question. Prompter is deliberately constrained - it retrieves passages from the documentation and answers only from them, cites what it used, and refuses when the material isn’t there. How that works is covered in Grounded answers.
When not to rely on it
Section titled “When not to rely on it”- Undocumented territory - internals, edge-case behavior, or brand-new features the docs don’t cover yet. Prompter will refuse; ask the community.
- Judgment calls - “should we use event sourcing for this system?” deserves a conversation, not a retrieval. Prompter can quote the trade-off pages, but the decision is yours.
- Roadmap and plans - Prompter knows what is, not what’s coming. Ask the maintainers.
- Anything where the answer matters more than the speed - Prompter is a first answer, not a final authority. The sources are linked precisely so you can verify.