Today, Red Hat announced the tech preview of Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant. This project has been in development for a while and much has happened over that time period. We began before ChatGPT was all the rage, before GPT4, Google Bard, and Microsoft’s OpenAI investments were announced. It’s hard to believe that all that has happened in just the span of a few months; though, the efforts behind those products have been years-long investments. While all of these announcements have fueled AI interest across a broad domain, we remain focused on how we can improve Ansible and the Ansible experience with generative AI.

This announcement is the first step toward that “best Ansible experience” with generative AI. The tech preview will enable users to leverage our service, and help us make it better. I say “make it better” because there is a perception that generative AI is going to replace people for writing (code, automation, legal docs, etc.). But, that is far from the truth; especially if you follow the news and find incidents of people already placing too much trust in the output of generative AI. Rather, these tools augment the writing process at this stage. They help one get started by either creating a template that must be edited, or recommending changes. There is still a cognitive burden placed on the person writing the automation to ensure that the recommendation is valid and complete. We know that Ansible Lightspeed doesn’t always give the best recommendations, but the use of the service will help inform us of the gaps which lead to improvement. And, since we’re only focused on Ansible, we think that we can have an accelerated timeline to make Ansible recommendations better.

The Red Hat team has been hard at work creating material that help demonstrate how to use Ansible Lightspeed and introductory videos that describe that content in more detail.

Join many of us in our Matrix channel for Ansible Lightspeed discussion, questions, etc. We look forward to seeing you there.