Using Pieces: A Technical Writer's Perspective

Hello! I’m super excited to share a new tool I've been using recently that has significantly boosted my productivity and made my writing process a lot smoother.

As you might have guessed from the title, I’ll be talking about Pieces (and I'm not talking about puzzle pieces).

To give you a bit of background on why I'm writing this article, I'll tell you how I found out about Pieces. The first time I came across Pieces was a few weeks ago in one of their Twitter spaces. During the space, I got the impression that the team working on Pieces is really passionate about what they are doing, and that stuck in my mind.

Later on, I got even more interested after a coffee chat with the amazing Sophia Iroegbu. She talked about her time writing articles for Pieces and also her experience working as a DevRel intern. After hearing about her positive experiences, I got really curious, so I decided to download Pieces and try it out for myself.

That said, let's first learn a little bit about Pieces.

What even is Pieces?

Well, basically, Pieces is an AI workflow companion (think an early version of Jarvis from Iron Man).

To give you a better idea of what Pieces can do, check out this 1-minute intro video:

Now that you understand a bit about Pieces, I'll give you a rundown of how I normally use it.😄

How I use Pieces

Over the past few weeks, I've had the chance to test out Pieces quite a bit. Mainly, I use it while writing articles and working on projects.

What’s great is how well it integrates into my workflow, making me more productive and helping me stay on task. There are several ways to use Pieces, but in this article, I'll focus on my experience with the Pieces Copilot (in VS Code), the Obsidian Extension, and the Desktop App. I'll walk you through how I use it, what I like about it, and what I wish it could do.

Pieces Obsidian Extension

Recently, I've been working on an article about the benefits of coffee chats for developers. The Pieces Obsidian Extension has been super useful during the writing process.

To put things in perspective, my initial outlines for articles usually look something like this:

Explain Coffee Chats
Benefits of Coffee Chats for devs
- Communication
- Community
- Career 

Conclusion/Tips

Pretty brief right? Ultimately, I need a much more thorough outline including headings and subheadings. So, to expand on what I have and brainstorm new ideas, I ask Pieces:

Give me a better outline, and create some title ideas for the blog

Here, you can see the beginning of Pieces' response:

As you can see in the screenshot, Pieces responds with a WAY better outline & even adds some suggestions for subtopics.

One interesting topic that it suggested including in the article was the "origin of coffee chats". I hadn't thought about mentioning that. Other than that, Pieces suggested some really good tips when doing coffee chats:

• Prepare questions
• Be respectful of time
• Follow up with a thank-you note

Without getting too off-topic, I really liked the new version of my outline and the fact that I didn't even need to leave the Obsidian app to create it.

Pieces Copilot

Another thing that I've been working on lately is my new portfolio site. It's been really interesting to go through my code and ask Pieces Copilot how to make it more accessible:

Here, Pieces gives me a list of about 10 tips, such as adding alt text, using semantic HTML, and ensuring good color contrast (for context, my entire website is purple).

Then, it provides specific code snippets and suggested improvements.

Honestly, I sometimes overlook making things accessible from the start and end up addressing it as one of my final tasks (I know, I'm terrible). So, for me, using Pieces in this way is extremely helpful.

The Desktop App

Last but not least, let's talk about the Pieces Desktop App. The really cool thing about the desktop app is the Live Context feature.

Live Context essentially gives Pieces the ability to look at the other things that you are working on. This comes in handy when you are working on a larger project with a bunch of files. Instead of repeatedly copying & pasting code, you could just ask Pieces directly about whatever repo or file you need help with.

That said, let's see how Live Context works:

First, we need to turn on Live Context.

Then, to give you an idea of what it can access, I ask it where I left off with my work.

As you can see, recently I've been working on my new portfolio site, which I haphazardly named Ellies-blog-links. Normally I wouldn't ask Pieces about where I left off, but I think this is a good way to demonstrate that Pieces is actually keeping tabs on what I do in VSCode.

Now that I know that Pieces is aware of what I'm working on, I ask it to review my entire repo and check for accessibility issues:

Then, Pieces responds with some accessibility tips, links to helpful resources, & specific instances where I could improve my code. This is similar to the previous example using the Copilot, but this time Pieces considers the accessibility of my entire repo.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Pieces has been a great addition to my workflow. I've also had a lot of fun learning about its capabilities and interacting with the Pieces community.

Now, I'd like to share a bit about the things I like & the things that could use some improvement.

Ways to Improve

• I really wish the Live Context feature existed within the Obsidian extension & VSCode (although I heard they are working on getting this integrated🤞).
• Occasionally the responses have some formatting issues, like too much space between bullet points, or going suddenly from markdown to regular text.
• Sometimes Pieces (Copilot & Desktop App) changes my code a bit too much (for ex: it might make quite a few changes outside of my original request, like variable name changes etc.) and sometimes it doesn't make enough changes. But to be fair, ChatGPT has the same issue. I assume that once Pieces has more time to learn about me and how I work, it will get more intuitive.

Things I Love

• Love the fact I don't need to exit whatever app I'm using to ask it questions (Obsidian, VSCode).
• It really picks up on your personal writing style due to the Live Context, so I would say it's much better with editing than using ChatGPT directly.
• The Live Context feature is very useful, I love how Pieces can look at ALL the files in my repo at once.
• The Pieces Team is SUPER responsive to feedback of any kind. They respond really quickly if a user is facing any kind of issue & then they try their best to fix it.

Well, that's all for this post. If you would like to try Pieces for yourself, you can download it for free here. I would love to know what you think!

If you have any questions about Pieces or want to connect with me, the best place to reach me is on Twitter/X.

Happy coding!