Red Hat has announced the launch of new AI features as the company targets streamlined developer workflow efficiency.
The company said the launch of Red Hat Developer Lightspeed, a portfolio of AI solutions, will equip developer teams with “intelligent, context-aware assistance” through virtual assistants.
Available on the Red Hat Developer Hub, the first of these AI tools is accessible through the hub’s chat interface.
The company said this will help speed up non-coding-related tasks, including development of test plans, troubleshooting applications, and creating documentation.
This AI assistant can be used via both publicly available and self-hosted large language models (LLMs).
Red Hat targets app modernization gains
Elsewhere, a new AI assistant will be available in Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications (MTA) suite. Speaking to ITPro, James Labocki, senior director of product management at Red Hat, said the tools will help developers simplify application modernization.
“The challenge I think that we see is, especially in large enterprises, a lot of them have developed custom languages, custom libraries, and custom frameworks,” he said.
“So code modernization can often be a challenge, and especially as those custom languages and frameworks percolate and organically move through organizations and get adopted,” he added.
“The question of how do you maintain currency of software is really a challenge for many of our customers, and this happens not just at the code level, but even at the operating system level, at all layers of the stack.”
New AI-powered features in MTA aim to address these challenges directly, Labocki explained. The AI assistant will help automate source code refactoring directly within a developer’s integrated development environment (IDE), for example.
It’s not a simple code editor, however, with Red Hat noting that it “understands migration issues and how to solve them”, allowing users to input queries in natural language to troubleshoot migration issues.
Continuous learning on the part of the assistant also targets long-term improvements, according to Red Hat. With each migrated application, the assistant will provide more accurate code solutions over time, thereby speeding up future processes.
“Let's say I have a statically coded IP address, and I know I'm moving into containers, and that's an anti-pattern, so I need to modify this code,” Labocki explained.
“They [developers] could then simply right click and say ‘please fix this’ - that will then reach out to the LLM of their choice…and will come back with a fix.
“The benefit of this that we see is that by having the static code rules and the examples and the patterns inside the static code analysis, and feeding that into the model we're getting, I would say more accurate answers than simply using an off the shelf model.”
Understanding the developer environment
The launch of the new AI assistants forms part of a push at Red Hat which aims to make it “easier for them [developers] to understand their environment,” Labocki told ITPro.
“When I have a question about a software template, it can answer those sorts of things,” he noted. “If I have a question about documentation, it’s just much easier to chat than to have to go open up a giant HTML file and web page, do a Control-F and find things.”
Labocki said initial internal use of the tools has so far delivered promising results, and long-term the aim is to further alleviate strain placed on development teams.
“Some of the early work that our engineers have done – and this was literally last week – I had a demo where one of our engineers was showing one of our product managers an example software template asset to modify it, and it did it correctly,” he explained.
“I think we're still early, but I think it's promising…Instead of having to understand TypeScript to define a software template in backstage, I could simply [do it] in Developer Hub, which is based on the backstage, be able to ask for it, and then it goes ahead and modifies it.”
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