Dosu + Apache Superset: Revolutionizing Developer Experience Through AI-Powered Maintenance
In the world of open-source software development, maintaining a thriving project while scaling to meet growing community demands presents unique challenges. The Apache Superset project—the leading open-source business intelligence platform and one of the Apache Software Foundation's largest projects with over 66,000 GitHub stars—has discovered a powerful solution through our partnership with Dosu, an AI-powered development assistant that's transforming how we manage our repository and support our contributor community.
The Challenge Scaling Open Source
Apache Superset's tremendous growth brings exciting opportunities but also a fundamental difficulty: we have a small handful of core maintainers supporting a community of thousands. The math is stark—we're outnumbered thousands-to-one on both Slack and GitHub, yet our community expects and deserves responsive support.
Our GitHub repository receives numerous issues, pull requests, and discussions weekly, covering everything from basic installation questions to complex deployment scenarios and edge cases that would stump most humans. Our maintainer team, while dedicated and skilled, was drowning in the volume of:
- Issue Triage Overload: Categorizing and prioritizing the endless flood of bug reports, feature requests, and questions
- Repetitive Support Requests: Answering the same installation, configuration, and deployment questions repeatedly
- Legacy Issue Management: Tracking the status of older issues and connecting them to related PRs and discussions
- Complex Edge Case Support: Providing configuration help for unusual deployment scenarios that require deep system knowledge
Before implementing AI-powered solutions, our core maintainers and contributors worked tirelessly to stay on top of community engagement. But the reality was becoming clear: this manual approach was unsustainable, and we were falling further behind despite our best efforts.
Enter Dosu: AI-Powered Issue Management
Our journey with Dosu began with a strategic decision to leverage AI for the tasks (namely, GitHub Issues) that consume the most maintainer time but add the least forward momentum for the project. Dosu works 24/7, responds in multiple languages, and ensures best practices are followed, allowing developers to focus on more forward-thinking work that adds value to Superset.
What sets Dosu apart from traditional automation tools is its intelligent understanding of code context, project history, and community patterns. Rather than simple templated responses, Dosu provides contextual, helpful assistance that genuinely resolves issues and guides contributors.
We deployed Dosu across both our GitHub Issues and GitHub Discussions, ensuring comprehensive coverage of all community support channels. This dual integration means that whether someone opens an issue for a bug report or starts a discussion for general help, they receive the same high-quality AI assistance, even linking to preexisting conversations and solutions on ohter threads. The results exceeded our expectations.
Transformative Results
Since implementing Dosu in our GitHub repository, we've experienced remarkable improvements that have fundamentally changed how we manage our project:
Achieving the Previously Impossible Scale: Our small team of maintainers can now effectively support our massive community. Dosu has enabled us to maintain responsiveness on all new issues despite being vastly outnumbered — which had prevoiously proven impossible to manage manually.
Evolved Reliability: While the bot had occasionally had some hiccups in early iterations, the product has improved greatly over time. Dosu now demonstrates a high level of reliability in its suggestions to folks opening issues, earning genuine trust from our community, and earning a lot of praise from new issue reporters.
Advanced Issue Intelligence: Committers and contributors have started relying more and more on the bot to help address the status of old issues and discussions, complete with links to other issues, PRs, and related discussions. This contextual awareness allows Dosu to surface connections that even experienced maintainers might miss. It's hard for new (or even seasoned) issue reporters to search for pre-existing issues and discussions, but for Dosu it's a breeze.
Edge Case Expertise: Dosu provides useful configuration and deployment help for various edge cases that wouldn't otherwise be solvable by most humans. The AI's ability to synthesize information from across our entire knowledge base means it can tackle complex, unusual scenarios with impressive accuracy.
Community Gratitude: Numerous issues and discussions have been closed with "thanks, bot" sorts of comments from grateful community members who received immediate, helpful resolutions. These genuine expressions of appreciation show that the AI is truly providing value, not just automated responses.
Approaching Self-Sustainability: Most importantly, we're getting ever-closer to a previously unattainable goal of a more self-sustaining repository where the community can support itself more effectively, reducing the burden on our core maintainer team.
Key results include:
- There have been over 2,600 issues created since Dosu was installed. Dosu has helped triage 66% of those issues
- Positive feedback on Dosu's response has been doubling month over month the past 5 months. This is a strong indicator that the bot is improving in reliability.
- Averge Github Issue response time went from two days before Dosu was integrated (typical in OSS) to less than 5 minutes.
Real Impact on Open Source Development
The integration of Dosu into our development workflow has created tangible benefits for our mission to democratize business intelligence:
Accelerating Contributor Onboarding: New contributors can navigate our contribution guidelines more efficiently, with Dosu providing instant guidance on everything from development setup to code review processes. This reduces barriers to entry and helps us grow our contributor base.
Enabling Better Resource Allocation: By automating routine maintenance tasks, our maintainers can invest more time in feature development, security improvements, and strategic project planning.
Building Community Trust: Something that is really important to us is giving maintainers control to build the community trust that will enable people to engage (with Dosu, and human maintainers) incrementally. This measured, community-first approach has helped us maintain the collaborative spirit that makes open source powerful while engaging beyond the scale we could as individual contributors.
Privacy and Open Source Values
As an Apache Software Foundation project, maintaining our commitment to open source principles was paramount in our AI adoption strategy. What makes our partnership with Dosu particularly special is their commitment to the open source community through generous open source pricing. This is huge for us, especially given the amount of traffic and cost that our integration incurs for them.
This arrangement represents a perfect example of open-source-based marketing of a commercial product AND commercial backing of open source software—a symbiotic relationship where both parties benefit while advancing the broader ecosystem.
Dosu's approach aligns with our values by:
- Providing maintainer control over AI interactions and responses
- Respecting project governance and community decision-making processes
- Operating transparently within our existing GitHub workflows
- Supporting incremental adoption that matches our community's comfort level
This alignment ensures that we can leverage cutting-edge AI capabilities while preserving the collaborative, community-driven culture that makes Apache Superset successful.
Looking Forward: The Open Source Advantage
Our partnership with Dosu represents more than just operational efficiency—it highlights a crucial competitive advantage that open source projects have in the AI era. Bots like Dosu have a huge advantage with open source projects, where they have more context due to the open nature of the code, discussions, documentation, and the vast knowledge base this all entails.
Unlike proprietary software where AI assistants are limited to internal documentation and closed conversations, open source projects offer AI systems an unprecedented wealth of context: public GitHub discussions, detailed issue histories, open design decisions, community conversations, and fully transparent codebases. This benefits not only Dosu's inherent capabilities, but Dosu can perform better since much of this history is baked into the fundamental model(s).
We believe that open source stands to benefit the most from integrations like this. The support we get from products like Dosu will lead to open source business intelligence progressing faster than proprietary BI projects. When AI can access the full context of a project's evolution, community wisdom, and technical decisions, it becomes exponentially more helpful.
As we continue to refine this integration, we're exploring several exciting possibilities:
- Enhanced Code Generation: Moving beyond issue triage to AI-assisted feature development and bug fixing
- Intelligent Documentation Generation: Automatically creating and updating documentation from code changes and community discussions
- Improved Change Management: Leveraging Dosu's context to help keep on top of what's happened on the repo within a given release or timeframe
- Cross-Project Learning: Leveraging insights from the broader open source ecosystem to improve Superset-specific responses
Conclusion
Through our partnership with Dosu, Apache Superset is demonstrating how AI can strengthen open source communities while preserving the collaborative values that make these projects thrive. By automating the routine and unblocking the creative, we're removing barriers to participation and enabling more developers worldwide to contribute to the future of business intelligence.
This more sustainable maintainer experience, faster contributor onboarding, and a stronger foundation for Apache Superset's continued growth will advance our mission to democratize data visualization and business intelligence.
Apache Superset is trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide for their business intelligence needs. Open source means features get built based on actual user needs, not what drives the most recurring revenue for shareholders. Community-driven innovation beats corporate roadmaps, and with Dosu amplifying our ability to understand and unblock our community's real challenges, this advantage becomes even more pronounced. We're building exactly what our users actually need—and AI tools like Dosu are making that process faster and more responsive than ever.
Ready to transform your repository management? Learn more about Dosu and discover how AI can enhance your development workflow. If you're exploring modern business intelligence solutions, check out Apache Superset and Preset for the most advanced open-source BI platform available.
Apache Superset is trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide for their business intelligence needs. With AI-powered maintenance through Dosu, we're making it easier than ever for teams to contribute to and benefit from the future of open-source BI.
