AI-Assisted Development in Action with Mendix

How is AI-assisted development different from traditional software development?

AI-assisted development is the use of machine learning to assist developers by providing recommendations in real-time and enforcing best development practices. Mendix’s AI-assisted development is mostly based on generative AI (GenAI).

AI provides guidance, assistance, and generation throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Guidance

AI enables developers to ask the IDE development-related questions. In turn, the IDE gives immediate, insightful responses with access to the sources used to derive the answers. Examples would include chatbots providing summaries, asking follow up questions, and consultations on how best to build.

Assistance

AI can assist with making real-time recommendations and enforcing best practices. It can create logic or automate real tasks that often slow down developers using traditional development methods.

Generation

A major difference between AI-assisted development and traditional development is the use of generative AI. Generative AI can accelerate the development process and enhance quality by:

• Producing front-end and back-end logic
• Creating application components
• Automating tasks like creating SQL commands and test data

What features does Mendix offer for AI-assisted development?

If you haven’t met Maia, yet, it’s about time you did.

Maia (or Mendix AI assistance) is our suite of AI-powered platform capabilities across the entire SDLC.

Mendix’s answer to AI-assisted development, Maia for Smart Development, provides guidance, assistance, and generation for Mendix developers.

If you thought development was fast with Studio Pro, Maia for Smart Development lets you go even faster. With Maia, you get the speed you need to deliver solutions more quickly. Bringing solutions to market swiftly solves your customers’ problems faster. It helps your employees become more efficient more quickly.  Spending less time finding documentation means you get an offline-first mobile app into the hands of your field services managers faster.

Take advantage of Maia Chat to develop using natural language in simple conversation. Ask Maia Chat a question about how to do something. It will provide immediate, detailed answers to Mendix-related questions and resources to discover more.

You can also use Maia Chat to build portions of your applications. For example, start a conversation with Maia Chat to modify or extend an existing data model, or create a brand new one, all by simply telling Maia what to do.

While developing, Maia makes recommendations in real-time with context-driven next steps or best practices to help you complete your build faster and more accurately.

Build AI-augmented applications with low-code

Your employees need applications that adapt with them and help them predict next moves. Your customers expect quality support and recommendations. Your partners want up-to-date forecasting. In sum: AI-augmented applications are in demand.

Lucky for you, Maia also helps with AI-Augmented apps, too, making it easy to deliver quality smart applications.

Experiment with smart applications without the organizational hurdles of setting up a GenAI environment on Azure or AWS by utilizing our Mendix Cloud Gen AI Resource Packs. This in-platform offering connects you to industry-leading models using Amazon Bedrock. Of course, it’s low-code, so the plumbing is mostly taken care of for you.

Or, have the freedom to connect to your preferred AI models with Maia for Smart Apps’s flexible hosting options. Think of Amazon Bedrock and OpenAI on Azure to bring your own LMM or FM. Easily create your own custom connector, fully integrated and plugged into Mendix Studio Pro.

Maia for Smart Apps gives you the flexibility and freedom to experiment and rapidly iterate by letting you identify which model fits your needs best.

You can also ground your GenAI model with your own data. This gives you organizationally-tailored solutions without having to leave the platform. With Maia’s new in-platform prompt engineering capabilities, data science and application developers can collaborate to craft and optimize your GenAI model’s output to produce precise and contextually relevant outputs.

How does Mendix help govern AI?

Any new technology gets people excited. They want to experiment and tinker. That’s great. But with GenAI, that can raise a lot of concerns with costs, security, privacy, and ethics.

Maia for Smart Apps includes safeguards for your GenAI applications. These safeguards help generated outputs align with your business requirements and ethical guidelines, whether you’re using Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs or BYO LLMs.

With customizable filters that help minimize harmful content and address sensitive topics (like hate, bias, profanity, etc), Maia’s content filters equip enterprises with the tools to detect and flag problematic content and promote consistent, secure, and responsible AI experiences at scale.

Maia supports Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures to combine GenAI with real-time data retrieval allowing your models to access up-to-date information from a knowledge base. This is important as it allows you to enhance response accuracy and relevance so that your smart apps provide the most informed, context-aware responses no matter how complex or evolving the use case is.

Maia’s Token Consumption Monitor helps you track and manage the number of tokens a GenAI model would use, giving you visibility into usage and costs. You can estimate token usage during experimentation and determine if the smart app use case is a viable one.

Maia for Smart Apps provides the controls your organization needs to let you rapidly experiment with GenAI and bring AI-augmented applications to life, but as securely and cost-effectively as possible.

How do AI and low-code go together?

When it comes to any new technology, Mendix strives to see how we can use it to help our customers, and how we can help you leverage it, too.

In the case of AI, Maia lets you deliver the apps your market and users demand, while staying in control with this always-evolving technology.