The world-known video game developer Ubisoft, which was behind the popular Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games, has teamed up with Mozilla to develop an AI-based coding assistant. The Clever-Commit assistant will use code to learn how to discover bugs that may emerge in the Firefox web browser.
Ubisoft already uses Clever-Commit to test bugs in the games it makes, so the partnership with Mozilla is focused on enhancing the security and stability of its Firefox web browser. The AI-based coding assistant analyzes code written by a developer and uses bug and regression data from the code’s base to search for new bugs which could emerge in the code.
While Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is open-source and used by many people, Clever-Commit isn’t. Moreover, an Ubisoft spokesperson told TechCrunch that they have no plans to open-source Clever-Commit right now, although it is “being discussed.”
This does raise the question of why the maker of an open-source web browser would help develop a tool that isn’t open-source, and not only is Clever-Commit not open-source, but developers can’t even pay to use it
When Ubisoft first introduced its AI-based coding assistant last year, it was called Commit-Assistant. However, according to the latest press release about the tool, Mozilla will be helping by “providing programming language expertise in Rust, C++ and JavaScript, as well as expertise in C++ code analysis and analysis of bug tracking systems.” This also seems a bit confusing because Ubisoft itself has plenty of C++ experts who work on game development.
Mozilla will use the AI-based coding assistant during the code review phase. However, if it turns out to be useful and yields good results, the company will also use it in other phases of the development process, especially automation. Hopefully the tool will be able to catch three to four out of every five bugs, the company said in the press release.
“With a new release every 6 to 8 weeks, making sure the code we ship is as clean as possible is crucial to the performance people experience with Firefox,” Firefox Release Manager Sylvestre Ledru wrote in a post on Mozilla’s blog. “The Firefox engineering team will start using Clever-Commit in its code-writing, testing and release process.”
He added that the AI-coding assistant is particularly useful because it will help their engineers see and address some crucial bugs before they are deployed in the final results because fixing such errors up front is cheaper and less time-consuming than correcting them after release.
