AI and Software Abstraction - A new paradigm

For the last 20 years our professional passion has been enterprise application development for large companies. Over all this time it is truly amazing how many different technologies, paradigms and solutions have risen to popularity. Software is truly eating the world.

However, there are fundamental downsides to all of this. Who can keep up with all these technologies? Application Development has become incredibly complex requiring ever more specialists for an ever growing amount of tools and technologies and potential solutions.

Back in 2020, being very frustrated, we asked ourselves: How does our future as a software agency look like? How can we enable our clients to achieve results in a faster and easier way? How do we stop reinventing the wheel over and over again?

So we went to the drawing board and looked into the first principles of the problem. The core challenges in software development.

The three core challenges in Software Development

On a very abstract level Professional Software Development is a highly complex process that goes far beyond coding. It is best described as a collaborative craft whereby different experts solve problems in creative ways with their respective set of tools available to them. This boils down to three topics:

1. ‍Process: The processes and steps of Software Development can be summarized in the DevOps Infinite. It describes all stages a piece of software goes through with different experts being involved. It is infinite as software is rarely finished but constantly worked upon in iterations.
2. Expert Know How: Each of these process steps requires a very specialized skill set like Developers, UX Designers, DevOps Engineers, etc. and of course the product owner. 
3. Communication: And last but not least - everyone knows the shit in shit out problem - it requires communication to ensure that these specialists can collaborate and an idea is transformed into a solution.

The Approach

Each of these three areas is in itself incredibly complex with each having developed a plethora of tools, paradigms and technologies over the years. We therefore knew that there is no way to solve this with any traditional attempt but only by addressing these core pillars directly.

1. We needed to bridge the gap between the solution running on code and this highest and very abstract level of software development. 
2. We therefore needed a language that covers all the three core challenges of software development and be directly executable on a machine.
3. Thus we needed a software abstraction language - so abstract, that it covers not only programming, but all aspects of the DO8.

And that was the birth of Tenum. 

In essence Tenum is a DevOps complete software runtime and platform that abstracts all aspects of the software development lifecycle by artifacts. 

With Tenum you can build complex fullstack serverless apps which will be exportable to iOS, Android and other platforms.

All artifacts are fully configurable via the most powerful configuration language there is - a programming language. We chose Lua as it is very lightweight, easy to learn and a high level language. 

Those artifacts, from things like message handlers and UI Elements to E2E Tests and Issues, form a language which is not only very powerful in creating complex software but also perfect for AI to understand and work with.

In more detail, Tenum has the following characteristics: 

• All-in-one tool, platform and framework i.e. Tenum is DevOps and communication complete.
• Every artifact is code and all code is 100% accessible. From your Projects, the Kanban board over the issues down to UI elements. Everything in Tenum is code and accessible by the user. So you could in theory change the full Tenum workflow and layout. 
• Dogfooding - the Tenum App is completely built with the Tenum core technology  itself, bringing dogfooding to a whole new level.
• The Tenum runtime is exportable to run on iOS, Android, Desktop or OnPrem.
• Every aspect of Tenum is 100% AI driven by the best of breed AIs available on the market whilst maintaining 100% Human Control. As good as AI can be, we think it is paramount to give users 100% control over anything created by AI. From stories down to code. It is all accessible and controllable. 
• We used divide and conquer principles i.e. we are drilling tasks given to AI down to an atomic minimum and executing them with highly proficient LLMs specialized for that task.
• We used declarative and behaviour driven software development concepts (BDD) to bridge the language-to-code gap  
• Best Practice Processes Interface: the software development discipline has developed many best practices in artifacts, roles and processes to cater for human interaction in a complex field. We believe that those can be used to design a beautiful interaction between humans and AI. Amongst others those are:
  • Kanban View
  • Issue View
  • WebIDE
  • Test Manager
  • Task Manager
  • Prompt Manager (coming soon)
  • API Manager (coming soon)
  • Page Editor (coming soon)
  • Dynamic self written Documentation which automatically synchs with your software. (coming soon) That means: Change your code - your documentation changes. Change your documentation - your code changes.

• LLMs as a Utility: we believe there will be enough competition making LLMs eventually a utility - from specialized to general purpose LLMs. Tenum can flexibly integrate different LLMs in a best-of-breed approach and gets therefore only better as the capabilities of LLMs progress. (coming soon)
• Talk with Karla - our AI agent - about every aspect of your application within every interface as well as your live app. (coming soon)

We can now best describe Tenum as a Generative LowCode Platform. Even though we feel this falls massively short of its true potential of becoming the first true AI App Developers.

The first true AI App Developer

There are several companies claiming that, but we believe we will, once we have enough data i.e. running apps on Tenum, reach unprecedented levels. And we will only get better with the performance of the underlying LLMs or agent-based systems. We think of Tenum as the platform which will enable true AI app development by combining the best-of-breed and the best-of-market LLMs with the AI-native language framework to build complex.

Beyond the AI App Developer

We believe the power of Tenum goes far beyond becoming a true Generative Application Development platform for Non-Devs.

With Tenum users can give their users access to their solutions without loosing their proprietary code or any revenue. Our users endusers will be able to adjust their software to their own needs. This is the realisation of an old vision in computer science formulated by Alan Kay over 40 years ago.

Also sharing will reach new levels as with Tenum. All the underlying complexities are hidden from the user and you can share any app, library, service, etc. (without the data). Once the Tenum library is big enough, even when starting an app from scratch, we solve the reinvent the wheel problem. 

We will soon implement documentation driven development, liberating our users to develop a concept of their app.

A new Paradigm

We believe that a similar approach to software development has not been undertaken yet and that we can achieve extraordinary results in combination with AI.

We also believe that AI will become a utility as the market will drive prices down and not one single LLM will dominate the market, leaving us with plenty of options to plugin the best-of-breed and best-of-market LLMs.

Our approach will be ahead of any ‘pure’-LLM player as it provides the framework, guardrails and language for human-AI collaboration on creating complex applications. 

We are excited to see Tenum come to life and hope it plays a role in democratizing software development. 

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