Faster workflow startup times

Faster workflow startup times

Usually performance fixes are a big meme. You get an app update and the release notes just say "performance improvements"... but WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

We make our performance improvements as obvious as they can get

Any time I did a live demo.. we'd wait 1 minute for a workflow to start
Any user that wanted to test their workflow.. would wait 1 minute for a workflow to start
Any customer calling our API.. experienced an unnecessary minute of latency

This was something so painful for our users we had to get it out

Real time actions

Hot off the press: Real time actions

No one asked us for this feature.. but.. every time I demo'd Skyvern, we'd watch the livestream take 4-5 actions in a row, then see a burst of actions appear on the right side

Why did this happen? Well.. we batch actions by page, and it was easier to just show them to users that way.. after they were all done executing

But.. I could tell. Each time this happened, the person I was demo-ing to looked bored

Why wouldn't they be bored? I was bored waiting for it to execute! I want faster feedback!!

So we re-did how we handle actions. We update actions in the UI as soon as they happen.. and it brings back the magic

Who knew demos + UX was all about focusing on the magic?

Cloning Workflows

Skyvern now supports cloning workflows you've already built!

This one came up as a surprise customer request. We're helping a customer automate invoice downloading with Skyvern, and they came across a website that refers to invoices as "statements" -- sounds pretty innocuous right?

It's not that simple. All the prompts refer to the PDF files as invoices, and they wanted to test if a simple prompt change for that website would work

What was the simple prompt change? "In this website, any references to statements are actually invoices".

They wanted to test this change without causing any regressions on their existing pipeliens, so they asked for a simple feature: "can we duplicate workflows to test stuff out?"

Turns out... the answer was no. So we quickly built the feature and shipped it the next morning to delight them :)

Importing / Exporting workflows

You can now import / export workflows in Skyvern

We started thinking.. why stop at cloning workflows? Why not allow users to export / import workflows?

This is an extension of a customer request. We had a customer request cloning workflows.. but they also mentioned that exporting / importing them would be valuable as they can version control our workflow states

This seemed like a feature we could ship fast -- we already convert an entire workflow to JSON / YAML.. why not allow customers to download it?

A few hours later and a delighted customer later.. here we are 😃