Today’s update adds incredible new functionality for both new and existing Losant users. The new AI help agent, with its ability to answer more complex queries, is a productivity booster regardless of how much experience you have developing Losant applications. We’ve also added automatic application archiving, which makes it easy to commit daily backups of your applications to your own Git repositories.
Losant is a large platform with a lot of documentation. One of our goals with AI was to make it easier to find information in our docs and other educational material. We’ve been researching various AI models, fed with various knowledge bases, and have found a solution that does an amazing job at answering questions.
The agent is available in both the documentation and the platform. Asking questions in either location will return the same results.
What’s great about this agent is that it has multiple sources of information at its disposal. If a piece of information isn’t in our documentation, but was answered in our forums, the agent will find it. Even if you know exactly where something is documented, it’s usually quicker just to ask.
In many cases, the AI agent can expand on the details of a Losant feature to help understand how it works. For example, you can ask it for additional inputs and outputs for Losant-specific template helpers:
None of the examples in the screenshot above exist in any Losant content. The AI agent understood what the helper does and generated its own examples.
As with any AI agent, make sure you verify results. To make this easy, the Losant agent does return links to the underlying source for any information it provides. If you find an incorrect or inaccurate answer, please let us know.
There are a lot of opportunities where AI can improve the usability and productivity of the Losant platform. This agent is just the next step in our long roadmap of AI features.
In April of this year we released the ability to export applications to your own Git repositories. Today’s release expands on that functionality by introducing automatic Application Archiving. This new feature creates an export for you once a day and commits the result to your own Git repo.
Application archiving works in conjunction with the existing Data Archiving to create a comprehensive backup strategy for your Losant applications.
Application exports are designed to work well with Git history and diffs. This makes archiving a great way to track the history of changes to your application. With daily backups, restoring accidentally edited or deleted resources becomes much easier.
Application archiving also adds new ways to manage application lifecycle. You can now promote an application by importing from a daily archive. This gives your team something similar to “nightly” builds for testing. Making it easier to manage application lifecycle is one of Losant’s largest product initiatives. We’ve released many features related to lifecycle and there's many more to come.
As always, this release comes with other features and improvements, including:
With every new release, we listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to improve the platform while maintaining its ease of use. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.