The code is ahead of this story.
Statewave Guide has been built in public for a few weeks now — one commit per build day, all of it on GitHub.
What hasn't been public is the why: nearly every day ended with something we got wrong, and a rule we took away from it.
This series tells those days, in order, one or two a week. If you want the ending now, it's in the repo. The posts are about how we got there.
Here's where it started.
I wanted to add something fairly simple to an application:
A help chat that actually knows how the product works.
Not another little bubble in the bottom-right corner that politely links you to a 200-page documentation site nobody has opened since 2023.
Something that can answer:
"Where do I change this?"
…and instead of writing five paragraphs, it just takes you there.
- Highlights the right element.
- Explains what it does.
- Walks with you through the workflow.
- And eventually remembers that you already learned it last week, so it doesn't treat you like a new employee every Monday morning.
Sounds simple.
Obviously it isn't. 😅
So I started looking around.
There are great chat frameworks. Great product-tour libraries. Code documentation generators. RAG systems. Agent/UI protocols.
Lots of very good pieces.
But I couldn't find the thing I actually wanted:
And one requirement became clear pretty quickly:
I don't want developers maintaining a second version of their application in Confluence just so the assistant understands the first one.
The code should be the source of truth.
There is already a ridiculous amount of product knowledge sitting inside a modern codebase.
We just don't normally call it documentation.
So this is where the experiment starts.
- We're building our own guidance engine around Statewave. No dependency on an existing tour engine.
- We'll probably make some questionable architectural decisions. We'll definitely delete a few of them later.
- And I'll share the reasoning as we go — architecture, dead ends, trade-offs, weird bugs, and the occasional "this was a much better idea yesterday."
The repository starts now.
Statewave Guide — Day 0.
First question: Can source code become reliable product knowledge without developers maintaining another knowledge base beside it?
This day in the repo: commit 5cb3c8a
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Statewave Guide is built on Statewave — an open-source, self-hosted memory runtime for AI agents. Governance and provenance, not just retrieval. Apache 2.0.
→ statewave.ai · github.com/smaramwbc/statewave
Every post in this series: The Statewave Guide Journey Index