Red Hat introduces Developer Lightspeed, an AI-driven assistant to streamline workflows
Red Hat has announced a brand new suite of generative AI tools designed to slot directly into the company’s development ecosystem. The Red Hat Developer Lightspeed platform will allow developers to work more efficiently via context-aware assistance from within Red Hat’s existing toolsets. This includes the Red Hat Developer Hub and the migration toolkit for applications.
The company describes Developer Lightspeed as a response to the growing need for reliable, domain-specific AI tools rather than everyday, general-purpose models.
In the Red Hat Developer Hub, the new solution will act as an AI digital assistant, handling tasks such as application design exploration, documentation drafts, test plan generation, troubleshooting, and so on. It also supports a “bring your own model” approach, so teams can connect to their own choice of public and private language models, balancing performance, cost, and privacy.
The second component extends the migration toolkit for applications, automating source code refactoring directly inside a developer’s IDE. This assistant is designed to understand migration challenges and suggest appropriate code changes, learning from previous projects so future recommendations are more relevant.
Red Hat claims this approach will allow enterprises to quickly modernize legacy software.
Red Hat migration toolkit
Alongside Developer Lightspeed, Red Hat has also rolled out version 8 of its migration toolkit for applications, adding new automation for replatforming workloads to Red Hat OpenShift, beginning with Cloud Foundry migrations.
According to the Linux maker, the combination of automated replatforming and AI-assisted refactoring will allow developers to focus on higher-level work while the system gets on with handling repetitive or typically error-prone tasks.
“We believe the future of AI isn't just about better models, but about putting intelligent assistance directly into developers' hands where they work," James Labocki, senior director of product management at Red Hat, said.
"Red Hat Developer Lightspeed is designed to empower developers and organizations to build and modernize applications faster, all while keeping up with important operational standards. This is a significant step towards providing a secure foundation for truly unprecedented scale and speed in software development,” he added.
Red Hat Developer Lightspeed for Red Hat Developer Hub (try saying that ten times quickly) is currently in developer preview and included with the Developer Hub or Advanced Developer Suite subscriptions.
The migration toolkit version is available now for Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite customers.
What do you think about Red Hat’s approach to AI-assisted development? Let us know in the comments.