A new AI platform built by a startup called Mendix is now available to help those with very little coding experience build full-featured enterprise applications. Called Mendix Assist, the platform is designed to provide real-time code assistance for situations where enterprise apps are needed but no full-fledged developers are available to get the process going. It effectively guides a “low-code” developer through the app development process while offering up suggestions for what code to put in place next. That’s accomplished with a claimed 90-percent accuracy thanks to a machine learning process which included an analysis of upwards of five million application flows across no fewer than fifteen industries. Beyond being accurate, the new platform can also offer quality, performance, and maintenance recommendations throughout the process.
Setting aside those circumstances, Mendix goes further to claim that use of its platform by developers can bolster productivity as well. In fact, the company makes the bold claim that its AI-driven code solution can reduce the impact of common code defects by as much as 100-times compared to traditional platforms. That’s because Mendix Assist isn’t only intended for use by those without much experience. Instead, it also offers built-in consistency checks, quality oversight, security configuration consistency, software maintainability, and scalability. In the shortest possible terms, that means that the system will check the code as its being written and offer AI derived suggestions for application logic flows and fixes. As a result, problems within any of those categories can often be caught before analysis even in situations where traditional analysis wouldn’t have spotted the problems. Because it can generally understand the logical flow of the application being built, Mendix Assist will also offer up feedback for how those should be addressed. That should equate to a serious drop in the amount of time it takes to get an app built to the appropriate level of performance and security – while also eliminating at least some need to push out updates later on.
Simultaneously, the fact that Mendix Assist is built on learning algorithms means that it should continue to improve over time. It will, in effect, learn from the code it is helping to create in order to fill out its own intelligence and offer more and better solutions to other developers in the process. That analysis is also conducted anonymously to aid in preventing unwanted leaks of unfinished products. With that said, this is also an industry-first, placing Mendix as the first to take this new AI co-development approach to build enterprise-level software.