We have really exciting news for everyone at Rischio. We have been working very hard on the relaunch of our application. The main reasons of that are related to the ability to add new features in a quick and reliable way. Before, we used no-code tools which allowed us to launch quickly, but time made us understand two things:
- Our product is good
- We need to move fast
That’s why we moved all our codebase to Ruby on Rails (RoR) + React. RoR allows us to ship fast new features on the way the application serves the web and its different sections, and React allows us to create interactive and dynamic interfaces for our engineering applications, which will result in drag-and-drop and more amazing UI features.
Our stance on AI
I think this is a good time to make clear our stance regarding the use of AI. Before all this AI revolution we are living, we use to manually dig into documentation, ask on IRC channels and of course, search our questions on StackOverflow (which sometimes resulted in passive-aggressive responses by people annoyed by silly questions, but most of the time you were able to find what you needed) in order to get through all the situations and blockages we had when developing code.
Today it’s different. AI can create your code and entire codebases which (most of the time) can work as you expect. And that’s why you see that many people are launching their ideas in a very fast pace, but most of them don’t know if their software is reliable, not only in terms of security and reliability, but in terms of being able to deliver correct answers or solve problems in the right way.
This is critical when we are talking about engineering. As engineers, we need reliable, and reproducible results, and I want to emphasize in reproducible results.
AI is capable of doing math calculations, but AI models are NOT deterministic and that’s why they hallucinate and give funny answers some times, which means that results might not be reproducible and that’s why, our calculations engine is 100% AI free.
This decision means that every calculation done with our platform has been written by a human being which tested several cases against hand calculations and book examples. And the number of test cases is always increasing, especially when a bug is found (yes, software will never be bug free).
We fully bellieve in the AI revolution and it helps us to develop our platform. It is a great tool for solving questions, getting ideas and fixing pieces of code, and it has helped a lot especially in the user interfaces you are seeing right now, but it is just that: a tool. Not a single line of code has been introduced without human review. But for our calculation engine, it’s development will remain AI free, whether anyone consider it a good thing or a bad thing, this will be the philosophy behiind it until we can ensure that the code will remain reliable and calculations reproducible.
New interfaces for our tools
Let’s have a look on the new interface for the tools.
Models index
Our models index now shows all your models in a sidebar and when you hover on them you can preview the selected model.
New model
It is very similar to models index, but now you can see all the templates in the sidebar and preview them so you know if the template fits your needs.
Model editors
Our model editors remain very similar (for now). We expect to make more interactive the preview of the model and introduce features such as drag-and-drop, right-click and more.
Results
The results page now has a custom sidebar (right now looks quite empty) but soo you will be able to personalize the results view from here.
Final words
We are evolving, and everyone should. We hope the new platform helps you achieve your engineering goals and improve your workflow. We have launched on a new platform but our values are the same and we will keep delivering quality software for you. Please be patient as the new features require hard work and testing (human work and human testing).