Every developer has their own style of writing code. Even though companies are establishing best practices and writing documentation, it can be difficult for developers to understand someone else’s codebase.
To solve this problem, Dennis Pilarinos built a tool called Unblocked. This is an AI-driven assistant that answers contextual questions about lines of code.
Pilarinos is a veteran expert in building developer tools. He works as director of Microsoft and Amazon, working on Azure and Amazon Web Services. Pilarinos then built an ongoing integrated platform for remote teams called BuddyBuild, which was acquired by Apple in 2018, and worked at Apple on the Xcode Cloud platform for about two years.
“Developers trying to get the information they want are extremely painful and time-consuming,” Pilarinos told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “We wanted to use all the data, code and tribal knowledge about the conversation to present a simple answer to the developer.”
Pilarinos added that increasing the number of AI programming tools that permeate developer workflows will exacerbate the aforementioned issues.
Unblocked is integrated with development environments and apps such as Slack, Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, and Notion. This tool will help you gather intelligence about your company’s codebase and answer questions such as “where do you define user metrics for your system?” Developers can also use the platform to search for people who have made changes to a particular module and gain immediate insights.
Admin Management, which is easily recruited by corporate system administrators, works to integrate with cursors and adorable platforms to improve code explanability.
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Beyond this, Unblocked develops tools that actively support developers in projects rather than simply answering questions. One autonomous CI triage supports developers in testing their code through a variety of scenarios.
Companies like Unblocked Dorata, AppDirect, Big Cartel, Travelperk are counted as customers. Pilarinos claims Drata engineers can save 1-2 hours a week using Unblocked’s platform.
Unblocked said Tuesday it raised $20 million in Series A funding from B Capital and Radical Ventures. The round raised the company’s total capital, which was raised to $30 million from investors, including Amplify Partners, First Round Capital and XYZ Capital.
Radical Ventures partner Rob Toews said that as AI-generated code multiplies, products that are not blocked are of great value.
“There are papers that say that much of the future software will be written by AI,” says Toews. “It has the second and third order effects, creating new challenges. One of them is that people don’t understand when, why, and how (part of a particular code) was written.”
Toews believes that it’s not blocked just as AI-powered Glean allows businesses to understand most of their data, it helps developers understand an increasingly complex codebase.