At Mendix, we are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help developers model and deliver applications faster, with more consistency and with higher quality.
Evolving AI support in Mendix
This is an emerging trend in software development, commonly known as AI-Assisted Development (AIAD). AIAD in the Mendix Platform is called Mendix Assist. Mendix Assist consists of different capabilities that act as virtual co-developer bots, each specialized in a certain domain or stage of the application development lifecycle. Currently, we have two virtual co-developer bots: MxAssist Logic Bot and MxAssist Performance.
At MxWorld 2021, we announced the latest addition to the MxAssist family: Page Bot. Page Bot is another friendly bot that will help you build beautiful, user-friendly pages — all based on decades worth of page modelling experience. We are committed to bringing you new AI Bots for software development by continuously improving our existing AI models and capabilities.
Bot upgrade coming your way
We are happy to announce that a new version of the MxAssist Logic Bot has just been released!
The MxAssist Logic Bot gives you a real-time and context-driven list of the next most relevant actions in the microflow modelling, based on the already designed application logic and other context-related information (click here to learn how to use this Bot).
We have seen encouraging usage and adoption of the MxAssist Logic Bot by Mendix developers. More than two thousand Mendix developers are regularly using MxAssist Logic Bot in their microflow modelling, and 600k microflow actions have been created using MxAssist Logic Bot recommendations since its launch. We aim at improving the capability further and have more Mendix developers using it.
Since its launch, we have received valuable feedback to improve the recommendation quality, user experience, and performance. Earlier this year, we substantially iterated the MxAssist Logic Bot in all three components — the AI Model, UI and UX, and performance — as follows:
An ever-more clever AI bot
The AI model has been now retrained with a fresh and substantially bigger dataset. More context-related features, microflow actions and parameters were added to the AI model. These have improved the recommendation accuracy of the next best (top 1) microflow action (the top recommendation in the Logic Bot recommendation menu) to 90% and the next 5 best microflow actions to 98%. That means that we can predict your exact next microflow action correctly on 9 out of 10 occasions. And in almost all occasions, the next microflow action is definitely in the MxAssist Logic Bot top 5 suggestions.
The user interface has been completely redesigned to make the user experience smoother and more intuitive. We provided better integration and interaction with the microflow editor UI to avoid any overlaps. In addition, new controls and interfaces are introduced to give more control to users.
Performance both on the back-end and front-end side has also been enhanced. The user interface responsiveness and interaction is faster thanks to several performance optimizations that have reduced server calls by 92% and user CPU usage by 35% on average. The Logic Bot microservice is also deployed in more regions to reduce network latency.
It is noteworthy that most of the above improvements were gradually released over Mendix 9 monthly releases and Mendix 8.18. If you have not used the new version of the MxAssist Logic Bot yet, log into the Platform and give it a try. Let us know what you think — your feedback is often the basis of our next iteration!