about
The dog came first.
Doug the product is named after Doug the dog, not the other way around. Here’s how that happened, who built it, and how to get involved.
Origin
Saint Bernards have had one job for three centuries.
Monks at the Great St Bernard Hospice, high in the Alps between Switzerland and Italy, have bred the dogs since the 17th century for exactly one task: find the traveler buried in the snow, and bring help. They don’t dig you out themselves. They find you, and they get a person.
That’s the whole shape of the product, too. Doug doesn’t fix your code and doesn’t hold your merge — it finds the pull request that’s actually in trouble and puts a human in front of it. Everything else clears.
This Doug is a real dog, not a mascot invented for the pitch. He mostly guards a couch. The metaphor is aspirational.
Who’s behind it
Built by one person, for now.
Andrew served first with the 82nd Airborne Division as a 19D cavalry scout, deployed to Sadr City in Baghdad. He went on to the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division as a signals intelligence analyst, deploying to Afghanistan and working alongside units on the Pakistan border.
A scout and an intel analyst do the same job from opposite ends: decide what deserves someone’s attention, and let the rest go. Getting that wrong in either direction costs something.
He studied at Purdue afterward and works today as a principal engineer in insurtech. Doug is a side project, built at night on the same instinct — most pull requests don’t need a human, so find the ones that do, and say so honestly when you’re wrong.
Get involved
Three ways in.
01
Star it
Doug is dogfooding on this repo. A star is the cheapest way to say the live path is worth hardening for other installs.
02
Ask Doug something
One click, one fact — about the dog, or the product.
03
Tell us your story
Had a PR that needed a human and didn’t get one? Or one Doug would have wrongly flagged? Open it as an issue — it’s the fastest way to argue with the scoring.
Open an issue