Monday 1 April 2024

Deploy Code at the Speed of AI with Ship Happens

Image from DALL-E 3 based on a prompt by Bob Buzzard


Introduction


It's been quite the year for Salesforce Einstein - Copilot, Prompt Builder, lots of new Generative AI features, and it's only the beginning of April!

Einstein for Developers has been out in beta for a while now, built on CodeGen - Salesforce's in-house open-source LLM. To date this as been focused on generating code from natural language prompts, auto-completions. and unit tests, but now it's time for artificial intelligence to dip a toe into the Dev Ops space with Ship Happens.

Ship Happens


In keeping with most Generative AI launches, Einstein Dev Ops goes live with a single feature and the expectation that more will come in a few months. It's quite the feature though - with Ship Happens, your code will barely have a chance to touch down in a scratch org before it's flung to production and into the hands of users.

You've Got to be Shipping Me


Research shows that by far the biggest blocker to getting code into production is developers accepting that they have finished. While this sounds like a simple decision, developers can't help polishing - always looking to squeeze another feature in, or a percentage point of unit test coverage.  Ship Happens unblocks your development team by handing the decision off to Generative AI.

As development progresses, the code is constantly analysed by a Large Language Model trained on years of Salesforce deployments, both successful and unsuccessful, and the quality of code for your specific instance. Once the LLM decides the code is as good as it's ever going to be, it's committed to version control and on it's way to production before the developer knows what has hit them. To ensure full traceability, Ship Happens reuses the same commit message when it takes the decision to ship a feature - "You've Got to be Shipping Me".

Welcome to Ship Creek


Crunching the numbers after the pilot program showed that users are delighted when Ship Happens. An updated experience every time they login, reduced waiting time for new features, and the oh so familiar bugs they have come to expect with every release. Once they accept their role under our new AI overlords, your developers will enjoy the freedom to focus purely on writing code - with Ship Happens in charge, everyone knows that features will be released exactly when they should be, not a moment earlier and not a moment later. Before long, everyone will be happily floating along Ship Creek and forget they were ever in a different place.





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