I tested the early access closed beta version of the Artificial Intelligence developed by Red Hat with IBM Watson Code Assistant. This was called since 2022 AnsibleFest as “Project Wisdom”. The Red Hat product is called Ansible Lightspeed.
Setup
To use the product, we need the Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ From the user’s point of view, the installation requires only the “Ansible " extension developed by Red Hat:
Once successfully installed we need to enable the “Ansible › Lightspeed” options: Please note that the moment is in a “closed beta” state, so we need to be invited by the Ansible Development Team.
Usage
The plugin works behind the scene in our Visual Studio Code. Each time we write a task name (in tasks or handlers section) Artificial Intelligence tries to predict a block of code. As we can see in the following image, the result could be precise or not, but it saves us some development time.
My opinion
I found the Ansible Lightspeed “Project Wisdom” pretty accurate on easy tasks such as installing a package or configuring a service. For some novice users of Ansible, it could save time not jumping back and forward from the documentation. When the accuracy and complexity of the task arise, the predictions become vague or completely wrong. The road seems interesting, and we will probably see a good product in the future. We are in the early stage of Ansible AI, and it is going to take some time to improve. But we are in the right direction. This project is specifically for Ansible, despite OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Bard, which are more general-purpose AI that can also produce Ansible Code.
Conclusion
After testing the preliminary Beta of Ansible AI, I think it is an incredible product that boosts a developer’s productivity. It is good enough for prototyping and speeding up the development but needs more confidence for production code. Anyway, I was happy to test the beta and looking forward to the final Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant release. This product has been known before as Project Wisdom since Ansible Fest 2022. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, Medium, and Website, X (formerly Twitter) to not miss the next episode of the Ansible Pilot.
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