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Tusk (YC W24)
p/tusk-4Make UI improvements with AI
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Michael Seibel

Tusk (YC W24) - Make UI improvements with AI

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Tusk is an AI agent that helps product teams complete UI changes from ticket to pull request. Automate away grunt work like minor bug fixes and copy changes to increase customer NPS without bothering your software engineers.

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Marcel Tan
Maker
📌
Hey everybody! @sohil_kshirsagar, @jytan and I are proud to launch Tusk, an AI agent that helps PMs and product engineers make UI improvements without needing to write code. 🐘 🎉 We launched our beta earlier this year with a select group of companies while we were going through the YC W24 batch. We’ve since battle-tested our AI across a variety of production tasks in mature, complex codebases. It’s been incredibly exciting working on the frontier of what LLMs can do in the wild. We’ve put a lot of R&D cycles into getting LLMs to make the right changes in the right files. Our state-of-the-art agent refers to an abstract semantic graph of your codebase and learns from your past PRs and code reviews to generate high quality code. 💨 Tusk integrates with ticketing software like Jira, Linear, Notion, and GitHub so it takes one click to create a pull request for your UI tickets 🐛 Tusk comes with out-of-the-box Figma, Loom, Jam, and Bird Eats Bug integrations that pull context from external apps to generate high-quality code 🧑‍🔬 Our agent runs your CI checks on its code output and automatically iterates on a branch until it passes all your checks 🧠 Our agent addresses and remembers feedback from any code reviews left by human software engineers We’re a firm believer that you shouldn’t need to bother your software engineers to fix padding on a modal or change the text of a header. Evidently we’re not alone. Tusk is now helping high-growth companies, backed by the likes of Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Tiger Global, save $36K in engineering hours a year. Try Tusk for free on your own repo today: https://usetusk.ai/ Feel free to ask your questions here or reach out to me at marcel@usetusk.ai. :)
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sohil_kshirsagar @jytan @dash4u thanks for the kind words! Yes, we do support more complex UI changes like adding a net new component or changing the interaction of an element. The popular use case is fixing bugs since that has more of an impact on customer NPS. If you go to https://usetusk.ai/ and click on "Customers" in the website header, you can see real examples of customer tickets that Tusk has created a merged PR for.
Joseph Abraham
@sohil_kshirsagar @jytan @marceltan Well done on the launch! Wishing you continued success and growth. How did you come up with the idea?
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sohil_kshirsagar @jytan @kjosephabraham thanks for the support Joseph! We had the idea while working as a PM and product engineer at our previous jobs. As a PM, I'd want to get UI polish tickets resolved before a launch or fix a minor bug to make a customer happy. But as Sohil and Jun Yu can attest, these types of tasks often take time away from already over-burdened engineers. We'd been experimenting with LLMs since GPT-3 (I was a PM at an AI company) and we saw a clear use case for having an agent automate away these engineering chores.
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sohil_kshirsagar @jytan @leovs09 Thanks for the support, Vlad! Feel free to try Tusk out for free.
Nash
@sohil_kshirsagar @jytan @marceltan great work folks! When do you think Tusk won't be a good fit? Large code bases? Code that's not well segmented? Large monolithic apps?
André J
💎 Pixel perfection
I use cursor everyday for stuff like this. but It needs a lot of handholding for smaller tweaks, as the edge specific cases are not usually something general knowledge LLMs are gd at solving. But the LLM will often give some nice ideas that can be tweaked and made to work. I guess Tusk could be useful in the scenario as well. Maybe not 100% solves it, but gd enough for an engineer to take it further? Whats the experience here. I know the marketing will want to say its a one stop solution that solves it all 100%. but that's just not feasible with todays level of LLM's. Whats would the honest marketing say? 😬
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sentry_co hey André, thanks for the question! Our unassisted PR merged rate for smaller tickets is 71% for codebases of a good fit. You're right that there are tasks where Tusk creates a draft PR that's 80% of the way there. An engineer can then checkout the branch and complete the rest. In-IDE tools are great for writing code faster; we use them ourselves. Tusk is different in that we intentionally live outside of the IDE. We believe that humans shouldn't have to be in the loop when using LLMs for frontend grunt work. Our customers have Tusk running on their chore tickets in the background while they work on other tasks.
André J
@marceltan Looking forward to follow this. It will get very interesting when the LLM's improve and more PRs can be made automatically and completed as is. 💪
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sentry_co appreciate it André! We post product updates regularly on our LinkedIn (both our personal profiles and the Tusk company page). Let me know if we can be helpful to you as you're building Sentry. All the best for your upcoming launch :)
Johannes
Very cool! We're using it at Formbricks (https://formbricks.com) for some of our smaller tickets :)
Marcel Tan
Maker
@jobenjada It's been a pleasure working with you and Matti! Thanks for the support Team Formbricks :)
Chin Chai Michael TAN
Congratulations on the launch. 🎊 👏 Now there's no excuse for PMs not to speed up their product & UI processes and work flow. Excellent work, Marcel, Sohil & Jun Yu.
Marcel Tan
Maker
@chin_chai_michael_tan thank you for the support! We built Tusk because we wanted a tool like this at our previous jobs. Glad we can help PMs and engineers avoid the constant tension between wanting to get UI fixes out ASAP and wanting to preserve engineering bandwidth.
Olivia Jane Mitchell
Amazing work, @marceltan and team! Tusk sounds like a game changer for product teams looking to optimize their workflows. The integration with tools like Jira and GitHub is particularly impressive. Excited to see how it evolves and helps improve UI processes! Upvoted!
Marcel Tan
Maker
@oliviajanemitchell thanks Olivia! Feel free to try Tusk out on your own repo. If you connect Tusk to your Jira, Tusk will automatically surface tickets that are suitable for it to create a PR for.
Lukas Petersson
The team is shipping fast! Looks great :)
Sohil Kshirsagar
Maker
@lukaspetersson Thanks Lukas! Tusk helps ship even faster 🚢
Marcel Tan
Maker
@sohil_kshirsagar @lukaspetersson well Tusk did have the most commits in the weeks leading up to this launch 😇
Stephan Goupille
Congratulations on launch! Curious to hear what your success rate is for smaller, bug-like tickets Marcel. Basically unassisted PR merge rate.
Stephan Goupille
Also where do you think your models will plateau?
Marcel Tan
Maker
@stephangoupille appreciate your support, Stephan! Our unassisted PR merged rate for smaller tickets right now is 71%.
Marcel Tan
Maker
@stephangoupille we're using a mixture of SOTA models right now, so we've been seeing a tailwind with every new release of a more powerful model. There are still a lot of AI engineering techniques to be explored and implemented, so I don't see code generation abilities stagnating in the foreseeable future.
Tony Han
Whoa this is pretty sweet! As a PM, I can see how this can take care some technical debt and small bugs, so engineering team can stay on top of the big rocks. Love how the AI agent actually does QA work and will tell you if an issue is too complex! Knowing the boundary is so important for AI. I can see that over time, as the AI learns from the CR, and reading commits and notes, it will get smarter and fine tuned for the codebase. What does the future look like for Tusk? Running Tusk proactively to discover issues and suggest fixes? I can see many use cases extended from taking care of simple tasks today. Congrats on the launch @marceltan and team!
Jun Yu
Maker
@marceltan @tonyhanded Thank you Tony! 100% agree, uncertainty estimation is one of the biggest technical challenges when scaffolding reliable AI products. And yes, Tusk learns from its merged and closed PRs on your tickets. Proactively discovering issues is not on our roadmap at the moment, but Tusk already has an “auto-triaging” feature, suggesting actionable tickets from your Linear/Jira/Notion board for you to assign to it! The idea is to make solving simple UI tickets from your growing backlog as seamlessly as possible. Next up, we’re making strides to improve testing — writing unit tests alongside your test suite, automated sanity checks with preview environments so that you can be more confident that changes are correct and spend less time reviewing PRs. We’re also advancing Tusk’s codebase-understanding ability so we can better localize faults and solve them 🚀
Elke
Congrats on the launch, @marceltan! Tusk sounds like a game changer for PMs and product engineers. Finally, an AI that tackles the nitty-gritty without turning our devs into code-writers for minor tweaks. 🐘 The integrations with Jira, Notion, and even Figma are particularly exciting—it's all about streamlining the workflow, right? The reduction in engineering hours is impressive too; that’s a lot of hours saved for more strategic work. Can’t wait to see how Tusk evolves with even more feedback and iterations. By the way, does it learn from bad PRs as well, just to avoid artful missteps? Looking forward to taking it for a spin in my own repo! Upvote from me!
Jun Yu
Maker
@elke_qin Thank you Elke! That’s absolutely right, Tusk helps automate away chore UI tickets so devs can focus on solving impactful problems :) And yes, Tusk actually distills insights and learns from its merged and closed PRs — a form of “long-term memory” so it remembers from your reviews and past mistakes!
Michael Green
Congrats @marceltan and team on launching Tusk! 🚀 It's exciting to see how you've integrated AI into the product development workflow, especially for optimizing UI changes. The idea of automating those minor tasks to let engineers focus on more complex issues is a game-changer. I can see how this will save significant engineering hours and improve NPS for many teams. Looking forward to seeing further advancements from the Tusk team! Upvoted!
Marcel Tan
Maker
@michaelgreen appreciate the note Michael! Feel free to give Tusk a spin on our free plan and let me know if you have any feedback. :)
Yash
Great work! I had some questions. What stack do you work well with? What kinds of companies benefit the most from Tusk?
Marcel Tan
Maker
@yash3 thanks for the questions! Tusk works well with popular frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js. We've typically seen that B2B2C or consumer marketplace companies get the most mileage out of Tusk because these companies get a constant stream of customer-reported bugs and feature requests flowing into their sprints. Their PMs/engineers will offload these chores to Tusk so they can focus on higher-priority work.
Ken Jyi Lim
Oh sick, how big of a contributor would you say is Tusk in your customer's codebases? Would be amazing if the merge rate is consistently high
Marcel Tan
Maker
@ken_jyi_lim thanks for asking! For our most active customers, Tusk is contributing 48.9% of all monthly merged PRs. Caveat here is that we're creating smaller PRs. Across ICP customers, we've seen that 45.5% of Tusk's PRs are merged without any human commits at all. The remainder consist of PRs where an engineer will checkout the branch and work off of it manually.
Rach Pradhan
The new Tusk looks bussin! I think this will solve a lot of issues when it comes to handling pull requests on products in general; looking forward to see where Tusk goes @marceltan! Congrats on the launch too
Marcel Tan
Maker
@rachpradhan thanks for the support Rach! We've been shipping a whole bunch since YC and leading up to this launch to get our agent reliability up as high as possible. Couldn't have done it without @sohil_kshirsagar and @jytan :)
James Keys
💡 Bright idea
I believe this is the future of software development. New best practices and processes will emerge around these tools, much like DevOps arose from public cloud infrastructure. I can barely imagine what AI-assisted development will look like in 5 or even a couple of years from now.
Marcel Tan
Maker
@skolsuper appreciate the support James! That's a solid analogy. Bringing LLMs into the IDE has already changed so much of how we write code within just 3 years. We want to go up one level of abstraction when it comes to software development and make it so that writing plain English is the new way to write code.
Gab Rodriguez
Congrats on the launch @marceltan and team! Amazing stuff, this definitely is very promising and looks to be a game-changer for both product and engineering teams alike. I am curious on how Tusk is able to handle different tasks and stacks though. What do you say are the types of tasks it performs best on and which tech stacks do you see it working well with? Keep the great work! 🎉
Marcel Tan
Maker
@gab_rodriguez thanks for your support Gab! Definitely drew from my own experience when building Tusk haha. To answer your questions: 1. Tusk does best on codebases that use a typed language and in-line styling. The agent is language-agnostic and works well across popular frontend frameworks because we use an abstract semantic graph of the codebase that isn't syntax specific. With that said, we've tailored the agent for common FE languages like TypeScript, JavaScript, etc., and frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue. 2. Tusk does best on bug fixes that can be traced from the UI as well as product quality tasks like adding input fields, disabling buttons, and changing a variable name across multiple files.
Daniel W. Chen
congrats on the launch Marcel. This is full of potential, I'll have to try it out with my repo to really testify the effectiveness, but I really think it's the future of AI Agent. Way to be ahead of the game, congrats!
Marcel Tan
Maker
@danielwchen thanks for the kind note Daniel! Please do try it out on your repo and let me know your thoughts. My line is always open at marcel@usetusk.ai.
Donald Wu
Congrats on the launch, team! As an engineer, another great use case I could see for this is having some old bugs (P3's, things on the back-burner essentially) be solved with an automated tool like this. Where do you think Tusk is at with debugging and understanding problems without concrete solutions, or use cases like this one?
Marcel Tan
Maker
@donald_wu2 thanks for the note, Donald! You have the right idea of automating away P3 bugs. As of now, we're still mostly limited to bugs that originate from the frontend. We're releasing a way for Tusk to do automated sanity tests on preview environments this month, which will enable us to debug more accurately. We're set on achieving the former, i.e., debug and understand problems without concrete solutions. It's a problem that's twofold: we need to 1) provide Tusk more sources of context, and 2) get Tusk to reason through that context better. Would be fair to say that we can always do better on both fronts. But that's the beauty of a hard problem I guess. :)
Keshav Rao
Tusk changes the communication game between eng and pms. Looking forward to using it to maintain various projects.
Sohil Kshirsagar
Maker
@ke5havrao Thanks for the support - totally agree. Instead of PM asking for a fix, they just need to ask for a green check! ✅
Yanika Magan
Tusk has been a huge time saver for me within just weeks of testing and I can’t wait to introduce this to my entire R&D org! A few questions: How do you keep our source code secure? Will Tusk be able to integrate or use my component library when making UI changes? Any info on pricing I can share with engineering leads considering using Tusk?
Marcel Tan
Maker
@yanika_magan thanks for the support Yanika! Great questions: 1. We will not use your source code to train our models nor will it be accessible to any of our other customers. Tusk stores non-readable embeddings of your files in your synced repos, not the files themselves. If requested, we can block specific directories from being synced such that Tusk never gets access to embeddings of files in those directories. When Tusk needs to view a full file, our agent fetches the file from the GitHub API at runtime without permanent storage on our servers. More details here: https://usetusk.ai/privacy 2. Yes, Tusk will reference existing components as much as possible when making UI changes. The agent is also able to reference a component library that lives in a separate repo. 3. Our Team Plan is most popular for teams midmarket and up. It's $495/month for 100 PRs per month, 5 synced repos, agent customization, integration with CI/CD, and more. We have a Product Hunt launch promo ("PHLAUNCH24") that gets you 50% off for your first 3 months. But these engineering leads can try Tusk out for free first!
Matti Nannt
Awesome product with a great team 🚀 I have already used Tusk to make some improvements to our Formbricks app. It was so great to see a high quality PR created in just a few minutes! 🔥
Marcel Tan
Maker
@matthiasnannt thanks for your support Matti! It's been a joy to work with you and Johannes. Love the Formbricks UX by the way :)