An intent model lets AI generate enterprise code deterministically

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:34

   It is striking how, as I was listening to you describe the original vision, I was like, that all sounds very consistent with where we are now in the AI times, but for maybe the never breaks, right? Because we're all, I would say, at least most of us are living in a world where AI is doing a ton of stuff for us. The amount of output is up tremendously. And I'd be interested in to hear some metrics around what that looks like at our systems.

2. 8:00

   but then we also are seeing things like break pretty often. How are you managing to maintain the value of never breaks in the vibe coding era that we're now in? Yeah, we take a pretty different approach here to AI for software development than most things on the market today. And that's because there is an intermediate layer in the OutSystems platform, an abstraction of the intent of the application that you build with an AI.

3. 8:32

   You can use Claude Code. You can use our built-in AI assistant called Mentor. You can build with codecs. You bring any coding agent you like. And rather than manipulating code in our platform, they manipulate this abstract model of what you need. And then you press a button to deterministically, or you ask Claude to do it, you deterministically generate the code in a way that produces an asset at the end of the day that meets all of your requirements for security, role-based access controls.

4. 9:12

   All those things are baked in at the platform level so that every code asset created on OutSystems respects 100% of that. by the way, automatically reuses things you already did. So I go build with AI, I pick up Claude, and I'm saying, hey, just write me an app. It'll start everything from scratch, basically. And in a complex enterprise where I've already got hardened systems that meet my compliance requirements for GDPR or HIPAA, depending on what kind of business I'm in, I don't want that stuff reinvented all the time, go through another compliance cycle, pick up what works, add the capability I'm looking for on top of it, and push that thing out to production in a way where I know that it all works the first time.

5. 9:59

   And so that's really kind of the secret sauce in OutSystems. When you're building a new system on OutSystems, you're inheriting every piece of your enterprise control plane, if you will, in every code asset that gets generated. And that's really a very different story than almost any kind of other harness harness people are using today to build AI tech. Yeah, in general, I've seen this pattern a lot where the incumbent that has really well-developed primitives is in initially you have the kind of, oh, these startups might come in AI native and win the market.

6. 10:37

   But it seems most of the time that having these really well-developed primitives makes it easier to put an AI layer on top of that so you can get the most out of them and reconfigure, remix them as much as you might want. Those foundations matter a lot. And it's really hard to build those primitives that work at enterprise scale in the way that OutSystems is done. And it's not just that. Like, the software is one thing. The other thing is trust.

7. 11:08

   If you're a regulated enterprise operating in Europe somewhere and you have hundreds of regulators looking at your stuff, you've got contractual obligations with all kinds of customers and business partners, you've got privacy concerns everywhere you look. The trust that you have in any system is not just a pure technical evaluation of its underpinnings, right? It's actually the entire history of the delivery of systems like the one you need on that platform that you know.

8. 11:51

   And there are plenty of others out there that you can ask about their ability to trust it, what works and doesn't, et cetera. Like so the reputation that you build up over time for that kind of trust for these kind of hardened systems and regulated industries is a thing that is just very hard to get as a startup regardless of how cool your technology is.