When a conversation produces a good answer, Save This Answer turns it into a Document that lives in a Library, making the answer reusable knowledge rather than being scrolled away in a thread. The answer can be one Dosu gave or one a teammate wrote. This page covers what the feature does, why it matters, how to use it across chat, Slack, and GitHub, and when to use it.
What it is#
Dosu answers questions by searching your connected Sources and replying with citations. That happens in the chat at app.dosu.dev/ask, in Slack, and on GitHub. Most of those answers are useful once and then disappear into the thread.
Save This Answer captures one. When you save an answer, Dosu writes it up as a self-contained Document in a Library. From then on, Dosu treats that Document as knowledge it can cite, so the next person who asks gets the saved answer instead of waiting for a fresh search.
In the Dosu web app, you will see this as a Save as Answer action on a response.
Why it matters#
Engineering organizations answer the same questions over and over. Someone explains a deploy step in Slack, walks a new hire through an auth flow in a GitHub thread, or untangles a flaky test in chat. The explanation is correct and hard-won, and then it is gone. The next person searches, finds a half-related thread from months ago, and cannot tell whether it still holds.
Save This Answer turns those one-off explanations into durable knowledge:
- A good answer is captured once and is then searchable for the whole team.
- Team knowledge that lived in one person's head or one buried thread becomes a Document anyone (and any coding agent) can find.
- Onboarding gets faster because the questions new engineers ask already have answers.
How it works#
You can save an answer from wherever it appears.
From chat. In the chat at app.dosu.dev/ask, open the answer you want to keep and use the Save as Answer action on that response.
From Slack. Use the Save as Answer message shortcut from the message action menu on the answer you want to keep. It works on any message in a thread, so you can save a teammate's answer as easily as one of Dosu's, without leaving Slack.
From GitHub. On an answer in an issue or discussion, ask Dosu to save it. Dosu confirms in the thread and links to the saved Document once it is ready.
After you save, Dosu does the rest:
- Dosu takes the question and the answer from the thread, along with the citations that support them.
- It writes the answer up as a self-contained Document.
- The Document lands in a Library, where it sits alongside that Library's Sources, Topics, and Templates.
- Dosu can then cite the saved Document when answering related questions later.
Saving runs in the background, so you get an immediate confirmation and a link while Dosu finishes writing. A saved answer is a Document like any other. You can open it from Documents, edit it, organize it with Topics, and let a Monitor flag it when the underlying Sources change so it does not quietly go stale.
When to use it#
Reach for Save This Answer when a thread already has the answer, and you want to keep it:
- A question has a clear, correct answer that more than one person will need.
- A Slack or GitHub thread untangled something worth writing down (a setup gotcha, a runbook step, a why-is-it-built-this-way explanation).
- You want to stop fielding the same question by hand.
Reach for Generate Docs instead when you want Dosu to research a topic from scratch and produce a structured Document, rather than capturing a single answer it already gave. Save This Answer is the fast path that starts from a real exchange. Generate Docs is the deliberate path that starts from a prompt.