The Boring Engine

The Boring Engine is the core intelligence of Duster. It's not just a chatbot; it's a sophisticated 5-step workflow designed to act as an autonomous Product Manager ("Dusty") for your team.

It processes every message thread in your connected channels and decides the best course of action based on your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

How it works

The engine follows a rigorous decision tree to ensure high-quality triage:

1. Validation

First, the engine analyzes the incoming thread against your Channel SOP.

• Goal: Determine if the message is relevant to the channel's purpose.
• Outcome:
  • If Valid: Proceeds to the next step.
  • If Invalid: Ignores the thread or marks it as irrelevant, keeping your board clean.

2. Requirements Check

Once valid, it checks if the thread contains all the necessary information defined in your SOP (e.g., reproduction steps, screenshots, environment).

• Goal: Ensure completeness before involving a human.
• Outcome:
  • Complete: Moves to execution.
  • Incomplete: "Dusty" replies in the thread (in the user's language) explicitly requesting the missing details.

3. Decision & Search

Before creating anything, the engine checks for duplicates.

• Goal: Avoid duplicate issues.
• Process: It generates a semantic summary of the thread and searches your Linear workspace for existing similar issues.

4. Execution

Based on the search results, it takes action:

• Case A (No Match): It creates a New Issue in Linear with a generated title, description, and priority (0-4) based on the thread context.
• Case B (Match Found): It appends the thread context as a Comment to the existing Linear issue, linking the conversation to the tracking ticket.
• Case C (No Action): If the SOP dictates no action is needed (e.g., just a question), it replies to the user closing the loop.

5. Notification

Finally, it posts a summary back to the Slack thread, letting the team know that the feedback has been captured and filed, closing the communication loop effectively.

Why "Boring"?

Because effective triage should be boring. It's repetitive, rule-based work. By automating this "boring" consistent quality, Duster allows your team to focus on the exciting part: shipping features.