How Netlify’s AI Strategy Will Bring Empowerment and Acceleration to World-class Developer Experiences
Netlify’s Principal Engineer and Technology Advisor shares the company’s vision for how they’ll leverage AI to benefit customers.
As a composable web platform, Netlify focuses on the intersection between technological advancement and developer experience. We’re constantly raising the bar on both what the technology can accomplish and how we can enable our teams and our customers to make the most of that technology.
When it comes to our AI strategy, that means we’re focused on four key areas:
- Empower the Netlify team to ship faster using AI
- Continue providing a world class developer platform in this new, AI-native world
- Accelerate the customer’s ability to go from idea to production leveraging breakthroughs in AI
- Enable AI systems to work with Netlify’s platform directly to add value.
Accelerating Netlify team delivery with AI is an exercise in both advancing what we do internally, and exploring the landscape of AI possibilities. How our team approaches supporting customers, advancing our processes, or even refactoring large codebases allows us to understand the workflows more organically that our customers and partners also face.
Across the industry, we know that human computer interaction will undergo massive shifts as the interface between humans and systems becomes more natural and fluid. The adoption of these technologies introduces more than just new UX/UI shifts; it also shifts how developers manage security, privacy, performance, and more.
It’s common to see walled gardens emerge in times of flux like this. All-in-one solutions often attempt to solve all of a developer’s problems within a siloed ecosystem, but we believe there’s a better alternative— one that provides the technology needed to build advanced AI workloads with web technologies and compose the best tools in the AI ecosystem together. We’re reimagining workflows for how developers, creators, and architects on web teams go from idea to production. And we believe the key to that is removing all of the non-creative, non-value-add work from the process.
Seeing Beyond Today
Our industry established rigid, time consuming workflows that primarily exist to ensure the computers are happy. Humans spend countless hours mapping creative works onto rigid data structures, transposing content from one source to another, and reviewing whether proposed changes align with the fairly strict ways we approach building and publishing on the web. Every step in the process has a compounding cost in the total time needed to deliver ideas to market across teams.
But we can advance past the status quo. Using breakthroughs in AI, we can remove as many chores as possible and free creators and builders to focus on the value-add work that results in higher quality outputs and reduces time to market.
The final part of our strategy involves identifying and enabling AI systems to leverage the Netlify platform to provide value to end users. We see this with Cognition AI’s Devin software engineer, OpenAI GPTs deploying ideas to the web, and sites incorporating their web data into downstream AI systems. Our aim is to provide skills to the AI landscape through exposing our robust composable platform as a reliable tool to achieve goals of building and publishing to the web, empowering ongoing improvements and growth in the space that benefits all.
Key AI-related Initiatives
Keeping our four AI strategic areas in mind, our team at Netlify is looking across every aspect of the experience for where AI can add value.
New platform capabilities and integrations to make AI workloads easier and more reliable to build will be unveiled soon, and we have a host of publisher and creator workflows that will be getting AI-superpowers, which will reduce many of the most common and time consuming chores facing publishers and creators. Education is another way we’re bringing our AI strategy to life— helping developers understand the new architectures and patterns for developing AI for web experiences.
One key AI feature we’ve already launched shows just how powerful these new AI-powered solutions can be.
Examining “Why did it fail?”
About four months ago we rolled out a new feature to customers called “Why did it fail?” This feature’s one job is to remove the work of identifying why a build or a deployment has failed— that’s it.
Failures and bugs are an unavoidable reality of the development process and developers almost always know how to solve them once they know what they are. However, these failures can become costly distractions as the “creating feature” work has to stop and the “investigate issue” work starts.
Interrupting the creative process of feature building to review logs and identify what has gone wrong when a build fails pulls a developer out of flow, forcing a context switch and slowing development time. This is a problem our customers and our own teams face routinely, so we created an AI capability that solves it. When a build fails, it identifies what the likely issue is and offers a suggestion for how to fix it, allowing a developer to quickly resolve the issue and stay in flow.
In less than 4 months, “Why did it fail?” is already in daily use in large teams. More importantly, it has diagnosed over 20,000 failures for customers. If we assume it saves an average of 5 mins per failure (conservative knowing the cost of context switching and distractions) that’s over 10 months of working hours saved already for our customers— time that can be put back into shipping more and increasing the quality of their experiences.
Looking ahead
There's an immense opportunity for AI to enhance the web as we all go forward, trying new ideas and experimenting with the possibilities of providing more human centered experiences.
At Netlify, we’re laser focused on advancing workflows to give more space and time for the creative work that keeps teams inspired and motivated to do their best while adding real value for businesses. We’re intentionally finding the repetitive steps and chores in workflows and finding ways to automate, augment, or entirely remove them. These add up to significant benefits for organizations and we’ve only started to scratch the surface of what this can unlock.
Developers, creators, and business stakeholders are going to have more time than ever to spend on making higher quality experiences. They will decide when they want to set AI to a task or if it’s a pursuit that they want to do themselves. Just like the resources available today, teams will select their own combination of not just tools, but the AI driven micro-experiences within them. Individuals will find the combinations that empower them to do their best work and to focus on the work that they care about and let the other work be handled by automation.
We’re on the precipice of an explosive increase of people who will be able to create new experiences and ship valuable work that they enjoy doing, while letting AI systems do the rest. And we’re thrilled to be part of empowering that.
Sean Roberts
Principal Engineer and Technical Advisor, Netlify
Leading the technical AI strategy at Netlify, Sean is an expert in web architecture and experiences. His work brings foundational knowledge and capabilities to unlock development of AI and web systems for millions of developers.