IBM today announced the launch of the watsonx Code Assistant designed to help developers code more quickly and accurately using natural language prompts. There are two different models catering to specific enterprise use cases.
The first product, watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, integrates with the Ansible Automation Platform to generate recommendations for automating infrastructure and application deployment tasks. During a technical preview, the assistant delivered productivity boosts around 20-45% for the thousands of developers testing the technology.
Meanwhile, watsonx Code Assistant for Z focuses on accelerating mainframe application modernization. It provides automated discovery and decomposition of legacy COBOL codebases, then uses its AI model to translate selected elements into Java for deployment on IBM Z systems.
Both assistants run on IBM's watsonx platform, which relies on a decoder model architecture optimized for enterprise use cases requiring trust, security, and compliance. IBM plans further customization of the AI models powering watsonx Code Assistant to support additional modernization and automation scenarios.
The launch aligns with IBM's strategy of embedding AI into workflows through easy-to-use assistants. Other assistants in the watsonx line include watsonx Orchestrate for automation across teams and tasks and watsonx Assistant for enterprise search and conversational AI. The watsonx line also includes:
- watsonx.ai, a next generation enterprise studio for AI builders to train, validate, tune and deploy AI models;
- watsonx.governance to accelerate responsible, transparent and explainable AI workflows; and
- watsonx.data, a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open data lakehouse architecture.
According to IBM, their new watsonx Code Assistants give companies tangible entry points to take advantage of generative AI, rather than getting distracted by speculative future capabilities. The company sees an opportunity to tune domain-specific models that propagate best practices and prevent some of the quality issues that can emerge from models trained on uncontrolled public code.
IBM Consulting will provide services to help clients implement the new watsonx Code Assistants. Their expertise centers on identifying high-impact use cases tailored to each organization's needs and challenges.
By integrating the latest AI advancements into existing developer tools and modernization processes, IBM aims to smooth enterprises' transition into making AI a practical reality across their IT operations and applications.