Improve traceability of Fern Writer doc changes to a human initiator

[jkroll-deepgram]

Which Fern component?

Fern Editor

How important is this?

P2 - Medium (Would be helpful)

What's the feature?

My team would appreciate better traceability of doc changes made by Fern Writer by opening a PR via Slack (which we all love and have quickly adopted!)

• One minor caveat to using Fern Writer is that we lose "git blame" functionality, not for the purpose of pointing fingers, but for the purpose of identifying who might be familiar with a given topic. Since all of the git commits are authored by fern-api[bot], we can't see who authored the documentation and may be able to step in to assist, on a given topic. Are there any mitigations for this?

• I would like to see Fern Writer automatically add the requester as a PR reviewer, and potentially link to the requester and Slack thread in the PR description. It would be a little laborious, but then you could see which PR introduced a change, and then which human requested the PR to be opened.

• I'd love it to be able to use repo context files like AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md to give instructions on how to do things in the repo too

• Claude does "Co-Authored-By": Could Fern Writer could get the user's details from Slack and make them a GitHub PR co-author?

Any alternatives?

No response

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

No

[nicoleomeara-astro]

+1 to this!

We’re currently running into an issue where, if someone uses Fern Writer in a private Slack channel and doesn’t interact with the PR afterward, there’s no visibility into who originally prompted the changes. That makes it difficult to follow up or trace the context behind the request.

It would be helpful if the requestor could automatically be added to the PR as a reviewer (and possibly as the assignee). Alternatively, including the requestor’s Slack handle in the PR summary would give us a reliable way to trace the change back to its originator.

[kentdanas]

Another +1 here! @nicoleomeara-astro said it really well above. Especially on more complex PRs where Fern Writer may not have gotten it 100% right, knowing the original prompt and who made it is extremely helpful

[dannysheridan]

Confirming that we now indicate "requested by" to solve this!

Example: fern-api/docs#5203 (comment)