Announcing Tessl, the AI Native Development Startup

The new Tessl logo!

Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era, and helping shape a new software development paradigm we call AI Native Software Development.

Let me explain what that means.

The magnitude of the transformation AI will bring to our world is hard to overstate. Seemingly overnight, we’ve all been handed an incredible new tool that can both boost our productivity today and fuel our imagination of tomorrow. Many compare it to past technology revolutions ranging from the internet to personal computing to electricity. Regardless of where you rank it in comparison, most would agree it’s going to be truly transformative.

In the world of software development, we’re already seeing its impact. Powerful coding assistants that auto-complete as we code are being adopted rapidly and widely, with users touting huge productivity boosts. Other tools offer great promise as they automate tasks throughout the development process, such as writing tests, implementing backlog tickets, generating documentation or performing large-scale migrations. We’re even seeing the next layer of tools being built for AI-assisted developers, like ensuring generated code is secure or tackling threats with the AI functionality itself.

These solutions are amazing, and I believe every organization should invest in trying them out. However, they all anchor in the present - focusing on how we build software today. They look at the way individuals work and software is developed using today’s methodologies, and try to automate different steps to make those flows more efficient. In other words, they use AI to bolt-on automation on top of existing workflows and practices that have been built for an era without the benefit of AI assistance. We call the use of these tools AI-Assisted development - it’s the same dev workflow, but enhanced with AI.

At Tessl, we’re doing the opposite.

We’re looking to define a new software development paradigm, AI Native Software Development, in which AI is built-in, not bolted on. Our time is spent trying to imagine, alongside experts in both AI and software development, how we will create software in the future. We’re looking to capture - and help shape - both what is AI Native Software Development (the process) and what an AI Native Software Developer (the person) is.

It’s important to note that we believe software development - and software developers - would be more needed than ever, but they will look substantially different. What happens when creating an implementation is as easy as making an API call? How do you evolve and track software that changes an order of magnitude faster? How do you manage software that can be created by practically anyone on your team? These are but a few of the questions we’re looking to answer.

Guypo with his brand new swag!

On a personal note, I’m extremely excited for this new adventure. Founding Blaze (acquired by Akamai) was about making the web faster; Founding Snyk was about proving security can be embedded into dev. Both are great missions, which I continue to be passionate about. However, for me, Tessl is an even bigger opportunity - offering a better way to create software. Provide a path, made possible by AI, for producing software that is naturally more performant, more secure, and better in many other ways. SO MUCH opportunity awaits, and we have an incredible team on the case.

Almost the whole team for our first team photo!

Yaniv, telling us something amazing!

Recording the next podcast episode of The AI Native Dev!

Want to learn more? I recently wrote down some thoughts comparing the Cloud Native and AI Native paradigms, in which we go into more depth defining how the industry adapts to change, and adopts technology shifts, like AI Native Software Development.

Over the next few months, you’ll see lots of content on our blog and podcast on this domain. We’re inviting you to collaborate with us! We want to hear from smart people, like you, to understand more about this topic, to hear your views on where the future of AI Native Software Development is headed. It’s important to us that we help sharpen the most important paths, ruling out those that are less relevant. We’re building a platform to help make these workflows a reality and we’re looking forward to sharing with you as it evolves.

To get involved, or just to hear how we’re progressing on our journey, sign up with the button earlier up the page, or the form over on the right hand side and we'll share more news with you when we have it. Alternatively, follow us on social and our podcast via the links in the sidebar (below on mobile).