Ask Ellie

The next group of features focuses on turning answers into action and understanding production incidents. Ellie connects signals across tools, linking releases, errors, and incidents so you know exactly what changed and what broke. It doesn't show isolated metrics; instead, it composes answers from multiple signals to give full context. For instance, if a deployment caused a spike in errors, Ellie can correlate the release with the incident history and reveal which code changes are likely responsible. This capability is particularly valuable for engineering managers who need to assess the impact of a release quickly. The 'Turns answers into action' feature ensures that after receiving an answer, users have the context they need to decide next steps, whether that means rolling back a change, creating a ticket, or alerting the team. One question leads to one answer with full context, reducing the time from insight to action.

Beyond core question answering, Ellie incorporates advanced understanding capabilities. It builds a model of your system by learning ownership, recurring failure patterns, and relationships between components, not just isolated events. This allows it to reason across time, comparing what changed before, during, and after certain events to provide deeper context. Furthermore, Ellie understands the intent behind the work, distinguishing planned changes from regressions, incidents, and other unplanned activities. This nuanced understanding helps teams differentiate between intentional modifications and unexpected problems. Finally, Ellie tailors its answers based on who is asking; it frames responses differently for engineers, managers, and leaders, ensuring the information is relevant to each role. For example, a developer might get detailed technical context, while a CTO receives a summary of impact and recommendations. These capabilities make Ellie more than a simple bot—it becomes an intelligent engineering assistant.

The overall workflow of Ask Ellie is designed to fit seamlessly into engineering teams' existing routines. Ellie integrates with popular tools like GitHub, Linear, and incident management systems to pull data continuously. It builds a model of the system by learning from code changes, delivery flow, and incident patterns over time. When a user asks a question in Slack, Ellie reasons across this model to compose an answer that considers the current state, historical trends, and the user's role. The approach is not about displaying raw metrics but about providing actionable insights. For example, instead of showing a list of recent PRs when asked about release risks, Ellie analyzes the commits, known failure patterns, and incident history to identify which changes are most likely to cause problems. This methodology ensures that every answer is contextual and directly useful, reducing the cognitive load on engineers who would otherwise need to manually correlate data from multiple sources.

Ellie supports several real-world workflows that enhance team productivity. Engineering managers can start their day by asking Ellie about recent incidents, cycle time trends, and team velocity without opening multiple dashboards. The tool also automates error ticket creation in Linear based on Slack conversations, streamlining the process from detection to remediation. Sprint analysis becomes straightforward: teams can ask about code quality and deliverables, getting a summary of what was accomplished and what risks remain. Product analytics integration with PostHog allows users to ask about user conversion and feature adoption directly in Slack. In production incident scenarios, Ellie correlates releases with errors and incidents, enabling rapid root cause analysis. The outcome of these use cases is significant time savings—engineers report being able to answer questions in seconds rather than minutes or hours. Decision-making becomes faster and more informed because answers come with full context from across the engineering stack.

Ask Ellie is designed for a broad range of users within engineering organizations, including founders, CTOs, VP Engineering, engineering managers, and individual developers. The platform integrates natively with Slack, GitHub, Linear, and PostHog, and can connect to other tools through its data model. A free trial is available via the 'Start free' button on the site, and a demo can be booked for enterprise evaluation. The tool relies on building a continuous model of the engineering system, learning from code, releases, incidents, and product signals. In summary, Ask Ellie delivers on its promise of providing engineering visibility without adding more dashboards. By centralizing answers in Slack and offering contextual responses tailored to the user's role, it helps teams move faster with confidence, making it a valuable addition to any engineering team's toolkit.

Updated 2026-02-28