Introduction

There is nothing new under the sun. The history of human technological development and industrial development patterns have repeatedly proven that the emergence of epoch-making foundational scientific technologies will inevitably trigger a revolution in supporting applied engineering technologies. Old applied engineering technologies will be reconstructed, and corresponding products and industrial structures will undergo fundamental substitution.

Background of Technological Transformation in the AI Era

In the field of power technology, each leap from human power and animal power to steam engine power, internal combustion engine power, then to wired electricity and mobile electricity has triggered profound transformations in application tools. Sickles and bows gave way to horse-drawn carriages and plows, which further developed into trains and automobiles, up to today's new energy electric vehicles.

The evolution of computing power technology follows the same pattern. From the von Neumann computer technology system and programming language technology systems, to operating system technology systems, computer communication technology systems, and then to internet technology systems, each layer of technological breakthrough has catalyzed major transformations in application domains. Fields such as scientific computing, productivity tools, gaming and entertainment, communication networks, enterprise management systems, and audio-video processing have all undergone fundamental reconstruction.

Each epoch-making foundational technological leap brings earth-shaking changes to the technology systems, products, and supply markets at the application tool layer.

Since the 1960s, computer technology has been extensively used in enterprise production and management. With the development of foundational technologies in the IT industry, enterprise-level application software development technologies at the application layer have also undergone several major transformations. The emergence of programming languages, operating systems, computer communication technologies, and the internet/Web has given birth to engineering technologies such as modular structured system development, object-oriented technology, virtual machines, three-tier architecture, programming frameworks, and server/browser architectures.

The emergence of AI technology that began in the 2020s will inevitably bring about the reconstruction of application technologies such as enterprise application platforms, application architecture technologies, application development frameworks, and development tools. Currently, these reconstructions are happening rapidly. JitAi technology, as a technology system in the field of enterprise-level application systems, is a completely new application engineering technology for the AI era, representing a new system architecture, development paradigm, technology stack, and toolchain.

In the transition process between old and new eras, new engineering technologies and products will emerge from the intensification of contradictions between new requirements and old technologies, old products, and old orders.

In AI technology applications, enterprise AI application system development under old technologies faces the following problems and challenges:

Compatibility Issues Between AI and Traditional Systems

AI-driven assistant and autonomous decision-making applications need to treat various data in application systems as knowledge and various functional modules as tools, with the ability to obtain and understand knowledge in real-time, and identify, understand, invoke, and orchestrate system modules in real-time.

However, traditional software systems are designed and architected to be code-based and compiled, with application modules often exhibiting black-box, static, and rigid characteristics. These modules lack key features such as self-description, self-loading, atomic independence, dynamic hot-swapping, extensibility, and orchestrability.

Under such architectural constraints, AI cannot understand the functional characteristics and usage methods of application modules, nor can it flexibly and dynamically invoke modules individually. The entire system appears as a black box to AI, where AI agents can neither understand its internal structure nor invoke and control internal modules and capabilities. This situation ultimately leads to the formation of "intelligent islands."

Excessive Costs of Customized Development

Enterprises themselves are extremely complex, with each enterprise having unique products, services, ecological niches, business forms, organizational structures, and development histories. Just as there are no two identical leaves in a forest, no two identical people on Earth, there are no two identical enterprises. This differentiation leads to huge variations in enterprise business process management and transaction management application systems.

In the AI era, the differentiation of AI assistant applications is even more pronounced. Management applications are transaction recording systems, while assistant applications are transaction execution systems, with complexity and differentiation far exceeding recording systems. Differentiation means customization - enterprise traditional applications require custom development, and enterprise AI applications require even more custom development.

Furthermore, AI application transaction execution systems are highly correlated with the business nature and content of specific enterprise business production processes, having a more significant impact on productivity. This leads to broader AI application scope and more frequent user requirement changes, demanding that AI application systems be capable of rapid development and continuous iteration. AI application development involves not only large model integration and prompt optimization, but also continuous integration and expansion of data, knowledge, and tools, scientific decomposition of target tasks, agent task orchestration, AI-UI collaboration, input-output data processing, all requiring extensive customization and continuous development.

Under traditional technology systems, software development efficiency is low, barriers are high, engineering volume is large, and quality is difficult to guarantee, which has become the biggest bottleneck in the enterprise application system industry.

Excessive Costs of Tool Integration and Reuse

AI applications have integration requirements for "tools" that far exceed those of the past, but traditional technology systems lack simple, flexible, unified system architectures and specifications, which is unfavorable for flexible system expansion and integration of various technologies and tools.

Enterprise systems involve increasingly rich technologies, from databases, Web, security, to printing, payment, audio-video, 3D, BIM, APS, IM, documents, storage, IoT, communications, internet platforms, industrial equipment, etc., which have become common requirements across industries. However, during the application process of these technologies, module reusability is very low, and each new system development requires significant effort for integration. With the application of AI technology, systems will have increasing demands for rapid, dynamic integration of tools and technologies.

The software industry urgently needs simpler, standardized, and regulated, yet flexible and infinitely extensible system architectures to reduce the costs of tool and technology reuse, integration, and application.

Fundamental Challenges of Software Engineering

Of course, the above-mentioned problems of low customized development efficiency and high reuse and integration costs are not just bottlenecks of the AI era. In fact, improving development efficiency and reuse capabilities has always been a continuous pursuit of software engineering. However, over the past thirty years, no fundamental breakthroughs have been achieved in basic reuse mechanisms, architectural models, and development approaches.

Over the past thirty years, the most prominent development in the field of software engineering has been various programming frameworks and tool libraries. However, these programming frameworks or tool libraries often only solve design patterns, framework reuse, or tool library reuse problems in specific technical domains. Frameworks and tool libraries invented by developers in different technical fields are all different. To integrate various development frameworks and technical tool libraries, developers have to spend considerable time dealing with technical details and repeatedly performing foundational work. Meanwhile, due to the lack of large-granularity technical encapsulation methods and usage approaches, developers are also inefficient when using tool libraries.

In recent years, no-code/low-code platforms have gradually emerged, which are essentially integrated technologies. The biggest problem with integrated technology is that integration often means sacrificing "atomization." Atomic capabilities and programming and orchestration based on atomic capabilities are the fundamental cornerstone of software development engineering.

Once atomization is sacrificed and orchestration and programming capabilities are lacking, the platform's development expression capabilities become limited, making it difficult to implement even slightly complex business logic. Development speed may be fast initially, but will become increasingly slower in later stages, even slower than traditional development. Therefore, such no-code/low-code platforms that deviate from fundamental software development methodologies are not the fundamental approach to improving development efficiency.

To fundamentally improve software engineering efficiency, JitAi starts from foundational methods such as encapsulation methods, reuse mechanisms, and system architectural models, exploring new paths to improve reuse and flexibility. It proposes entirely new methods such as separation of technology and business, separation of structure and process, separation of declarative and imperative approaches, effectively extracting the orchestration part from traditional programming work, gradually transforming application development to orchestration-based with programming as auxiliary, greatly simplifying the development process.

JitAi designs application protocols from scratch, defines modularization specifications, and develops corresponding application interpretation platforms. Based on this foundation, it constructs highly integrated, large-scale but simple-to-use development frameworks, making the application layer ready-to-use out of the box, greatly reducing technical complexity, reducing application layer code by 95%, with orchestration as the main approach, significantly lowering development difficulty. Meanwhile, JitAi also provides supporting graphical orchestration development tools to further simplify the development process.

It's important to note that although JitAi's development tools possess powerful "graphical/no-code" rapid development capabilities, they are completely different from traditional no-code/low-code platforms. JitAi's graphical development tools are still based on atomic capabilities, supporting orchestration and programming, and possess all the characteristics of traditional development methods.

This point is extremely important, meaning that JitAi's development and expression capabilities have no upper limit, development speed will never decrease, and will never be lower than traditional development approaches.

What is JitAi

JitAi = jit + Ai, meaning "just in time for AI application."

JitAi is a full-stack integrated platform for development, publishing, deployment, and updating of enterprise-level software and intelligent applications (AI agents), providing a complete technology stack for developing enterprise-level software and AI agents. It includes new products such as JitAi application platform, JitAi programming framework, JitAi development tools, and JitAi operations tools. Through technologies such as underlying network environment platformization, system architecture elementization, AI-powered/visual development, and automated deployment and updates, it makes enterprise system development simpler and more efficient, extension more flexible and free, and functionality more powerful and intelligent.

Based on JitAi, application developers can efficiently develop natively AI-integrated systems such as aiERP, aiCRM, aiOA, aiBI, and various other systems; tool developers can easily develop domain-specific AI agents, programming frameworks, and visual development tools.

Development Tools

JitAi visual development tools (also known as Jit IDEApp) are used for visually managing and developing JitAi application elements, and are themselves independent JitAi applications.

The tool supports visual management, parsing application source code directories, presenting and managing all elements and their source code within applications. In terms of visual development, it can parse element source code, visually display elements and element invocation relationships, support visual configuration development elements and automatically generate element code, greatly simplifying development barriers, dramatically improving development efficiency and quality. It also supports full-code development of element source code.

The tool provides modular free combination/construction, visual development tools and AI development tools that automatically generate high-quality code, making application development extremely low-barrier, high-efficiency, and high-quality. It supports visual/AI-powered construction of various AI Agents, enabling AI agents to be quickly tested, formed, and applied within application systems.

JitAi IDEApp is completely isolated from the application platform, business applications, and programming frameworks, and can be independently extended. Visual development tools can be directly extended within business layer applications without depending on the official IDEApp. Development based on IDEApp features instant saving, compilation, loading, and immediate effect. All element presentation and development follow unified view, add, edit, delete operation patterns that are simple and infinitely extensible.

Development Framework

The JitAi development framework is a universal system model with deep coverage of business systems, high integration, high reusability, and infinite extensibility that keeps increasingly large systems elegant and robust. This is a programming framework designed specifically for AI and GUI, simple, flexible, and highly integrated, bringing ultimate simplification to the business application layer while still maintaining ultimate extensibility and freedom.

In terms of system architecture, digital systems consist of elements such as portals, front-end pages, front-end components, data models, and organizational structures. The system composition is simple but flexible, and JitAi system elements can build any highly extensible, robust, and elegant digital system. Portals reference pages, pages reference front-end components, and front-end components reference data models, forming a chain-like model with simple relationships that are easy to trim and extend. Developers can arbitrarily extend this system model.

The JitAi programming framework implements a universal architecture through technical layer type elements, eliminating the need for high-barrier architectural design in business applications. The framework encapsulates technical implementation layer elements of commonly used elements in enterprise-level software system development, with multiple built-in meta family elements. Each meta family contains multiple type category elements, and each type element encapsulates the implementation of a specific type of technical library. Based on type elements, business layer instance elements only need minimal configuration or development to express business logic, thereby enabling extremely simplified development of business systems. Developers can rewrite and extend meta elements and type elements in their own business applications, achieving rewriting and extension of the programming framework.

The framework supports application-level inheritance and extension, achieving zero-dependency, non-invasive reuse and extension, perfectly resolving conflicts between standardized products and personalized customization needs. Framework-level capabilities are reused without loss - business Apps inherit the JitAi programming framework and automatically obtain full technical capabilities without code modification. Element-level dynamic overriding allows arbitrary rewriting of technical implementation elements (such as components/interfaces/logic) in the framework at the business layer, naturally supporting hot swapping. Under the definition-based development paradigm, the framework layer pre-configures standard implementations of enterprise-level technical elements (authentication/transactions/logging, etc.) for out-of-the-box use; the application layer only needs to declare business definition elements (domain models/process rules/UI interactions), reducing development volume by 70%.

Operations Tools

JitAi operations tools (also known as Jit AdminApp) are built-in JitAi applications within the JitAi application platform, used for managing environment configurations and applications on JitNode, supporting distributed cluster management.

The operations tools are primarily responsible for developer organization, runtime environment, and application deployment management. In terms of runtime environment management, they manage cluster environments within an organization, create and delete clusters, configure applications deployed in clusters, server nodes, traffic distribution weights, etc. They also provide node management functionality to remotely manage all JitAi application platform server nodes deployed within an organization. Additionally, they handle application management and developer organization management, accepting developer self-registration and joining organizations, managing developer members within an organization.

In terms of deployment and updates, the platform supports automated deployment and update mechanisms. The server side can also achieve "automatic on-demand loading of the latest applications" like the browser side, supporting automatic deployment and updates in privatized environments.

Application Runtime Platform

The JitAi application platform (also known as JitNode) is a locally deployed integrated application runtime environment that runs, supports, and manages applications, serving as the "operating system" for enterprise-level applications. The platform adopts a completely new architectural model of "cross-platform operating system + cross-platform applications" through front-end and back-end infrastructure platformization and runtime environment virtualization, giving applications natural distributed, cross-platform, cross-device, and cross-language characteristics.

The application platform adopts a microkernel architecture, allowing both the platform and applications to be infinitely extensible. Application elements can take any form and be implemented using any programming language. The application platform covers backend, frontend, desktop, and mobile platforms, with application elements able to be developed for any platform while the platform handles frontend-backend interaction and invocation relationships.

The application platform has built-in distributed cluster capabilities and, through virtualized runtime environments, allows applications to be unconcerned with physical runtime environments. It supports application inheritance relationships, where parent application elements can be directly reused in child applications. Application compilation, packaging, publishing, deployment, and update upgrades are all automated.

JitNode comes in three versions: Windows desktop edition, Mac desktop edition, and Docker (Linux) server edition. One-click installation of the JitNode runtime environment provides all the infrastructure, eliminating the technical complexity of various tool installations. JitNode has a GUI visual management interface through which you can manage application creation and installation in local environments. Through the GUI management interface, you can also operate cloud-based application operations platforms to manage distributed clusters, development organizations, and members.

JitAi Features

The JitAi technology system possesses numerous impressive innovative characteristics. Simply put, they can be summarized from two aspects:

Dynamic: Flexible and Dynamic

In traditional technology systems, application system modules lack "self-description" capabilities and have no "user manuals," making it difficult for AI to accurately obtain and perceive these modules, and impossible to dynamically make decisions about selecting and using modules. Traditional tool libraries, programming frameworks, and business applications are mostly "compiled," with "hard-coded" relationships between modules, static and highly coupled dependencies. AI cannot dynamically load and invoke different modules on demand, and developers find it difficult to quickly orchestrate required tools for AI.

JitAi designed and established the JAAP protocol for standardized construction of application systems and modules, and provides an interpretive application runtime platform to achieve interpretive operation of application systems and their modules. The combination of the JitAi platform and JAAP protocol gives applications and their modules characteristics such as self-description, self-loading, high independence, replaceability, extensibility, and orchestrability.

In this way, applications and modules can be dynamically perceived, invoked, and orchestrated by AI, becoming interpretive systems and modules, allowing traditional application ecosystems to smoothly integrate into AI technology systems and be dynamically perceived, used, and driven by AI. Furthermore, the self-description, self-loading, orchestrability, and high independence characteristics of applications and modules enable them to be intuitively and dynamically displayed, added, deleted, edited, and orchestrated in graphical ways by JitAi development tools, bringing a visual, instant orchestration development experience.

Agile: Lightweight and Fast

Enterprise AI applications are more complex and difficult to plan than traditional enterprise management software, often requiring "modify while using." Rapid development, feedback, and iteration become key to system success.

JitAi provides highly integrated application runtime platforms, highly reusable and highly extensible development frameworks, and graphical orchestration and programming tools, making business application development simpler, lighter, faster, and more efficient. Developers can easily handle the complex variability and rapid iteration of AI applications, quickly building application systems with native integration of AI functionality and traditional functionality.

JitAi's designed cross-application module inheritance mechanism and module typification mechanism bring unparalleled reuse and extension capabilities, making technical framework applications and common business applications both highly reusable and highly extensible.

The matrix-type meta-framework model based on inheritance mechanisms and type mechanisms is a "universal architectural language" and a high-dimensional architectural model. It achieves separation and mutual invocation of technical integration encapsulation and business expression orchestration in a simple and elegant way, eliminating the need for complex, high-barrier architectural design in application system development. Its unique flexibility and extensibility ensure that no matter how complex the application scenario, the system can always maintain simplicity and flexibility.

The JitAi development framework developed by JitAi based on the matrix-type meta-framework model is a universal, highly reusable, and highly open orchestration-based programming framework that encapsulates numerous application technology implementations, greatly simplifying the business application layer and making it lightweight, simple, highly extensible, and orchestrable. Graphical orchestration and programming tools based on the JitAi development framework construct and orchestrate business applications through graphical interfaces, automatically generating business layer code, dramatically improving development efficiency and quality.

JitAi Architecture

JitAi constructs an open three-layer technical architecture, achieving full-stack integration from infrastructure to business applications.

JitAi's interpretive application architecture protocol (JAAP) and interpretive application runtime platform enable application systems to be dynamically perceived, invoked, and orchestrated by AI, bringing traditional application ecosystems into the era of AI-driven and AI-orchestrated systems.

The unique application inheritance mechanism and matrix-type meta-architecture bring unparalleled reuse and extension capabilities, becoming a universal unified architectural "language." The highly integrated and highly open JitAi orchestration-based programming framework based on matrix-type meta-architecture makes the business layer highly orchestrable, dramatically reducing complexity and engineering volume by 90%.

Development tools and methods supporting graphical orchestration and programming increase development speed by 10 times, helping developers easily handle the complex variability of AI applications.

Automated DevOps toolchains make the construction, publishing, deployment, and operations of AI applications simpler and more lightweight.

Comparison with Traditional Development Technologies

Compared to traditional development technologies, JitAi technology is more elegant and robust in architectural design. Clear and advanced system models and architectures, simple yet sophisticated specifications, allow application systems to maintain elegance and robustness throughout their evolution from small to large.

In terms of development efficiency, it is simpler and more efficient. Ultra-large-scale, ultra-large-granularity encapsulation and reuse capabilities, along with rich, infinitely extensible, full-stack programming frameworks, make system development extremely simple and efficient. Zero-code visual development tools dramatically lower development barriers, greatly improve system quality, and dramatically increase development efficiency.

In terms of extensibility, it is more flexible and open. Extension and rewriting capabilities at various granularity levels from functions to elements to applications (small, medium, large) give the system ultimate openness, extensibility, and unlimited customized development freedom.

In terms of operations, it is simpler and easier. Distributed, full-stack, autonomous, microkernel application containers make system operations (deployment, updates, publishing, horizontal scaling) simple and efficient.

Comparison with No-Code/Low-Code Platforms

Compared to no-code/low-code platforms, JitAi technology has significant advantages. It can develop highly flexible custom pages, component interactions, and frontend-backend interactions, with support for partial full-code development. Developers can build reusable libraries and use third-party libraries.

JitAi's unique application inheritance technology can create reusable application templates that synchronize updates. Developers can rewrite and extend any built-in features in the JitAi technology framework, including new page types, new component types, new model types, etc. It supports complete full-code mode, including full-code pages, full-code components, and full-code styling.

In terms of performance, JitAi directly generates native code without depending on rule engines, free from rule engine constraints and performance overhead. It supports full-code development and debugging with traditional development tools (such as VSCode), code version management, and CI/CD. Additionally, it has autonomous distributed cluster deployment capabilities.

Development Efficiency Comparison and Analysis

As shown in the figure below, different development technologies exhibit distinctly different efficiency change trends as system scale and complexity grow:

JitAi technology, based on AI development and visual development modes, requires no handling of infrastructure and technical details, enabling development of business functionality from day one with extremely high early-stage efficiency. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) characteristics enable timely communication and confirmation with requirement stakeholders, greatly reducing rework risks.

More importantly, as application system scale expands and complexity grows, development efficiency based on JitAi technology not only does not decrease but continues to improve. This efficiency increase stems from three core factors.

First, universal standardized architecture keeps systems robust and elegant at all times, without increasing system complexity due to scale growth. Second, continuous accumulation of reusable capabilities makes business development increasingly simple, fast, and high-quality. Finally, when team size expands, communication costs are significantly reduced, and the larger the system scale, the more obvious this efficiency advantage becomes.

No-code platforms have efficiency comparable to JitAi, or even slightly higher, when developing simple functionality. However, as application system scale expands and complexity grows, development efficiency based on no-code drops dramatically. No-code rules are difficult to express professional complex business logic and requirements, only able to implement them reluctantly through various "awkward" methods with extremely low development efficiency. More seriously, most complex business logic cannot be expressed by no-code technology at all, forcing termination of continued system evolution and growth.

Low-code technology, to address the technical limitations of no-code, has developed code expression capabilities in certain local areas on top of no-code platforms. However, this can only alleviate a few scenarios, and compared to the diverse and complex scenario requirements across all industries, this improvement has limited effect. As application system scale expands and complexity grows, its development efficiency also drops sharply, unable to support continuous system growth and evolution.

Traditional development technology has extremely low output efficiency in early stages due to extensive preparation and design work for infrastructure, basic frameworks, and business architecture. In the middle stage, business teams and technical teams gradually become familiar with technology and business, and efficiency begins to improve, but due to too many business and technical details to handle, efficiency remains low. Moreover, because of the long time span from receiving requirements to developing usable functionality, and the inability to confirm requirements in a WYSIWYG manner, rework becomes a high-probability event, further reducing efficiency. Additionally, due to large team sizes, personnel changes and the efficiency reduction caused by personnel changes are high-probability events. In later and long-term stages, as application system scale expands and complexity grows, development efficiency begins to decline due to system architecture and technical system issues, continuing to decline until the system becomes difficult to adjust and extend.

JitAi technology, with its characteristics of universal standards, ultimate reuse, flexible extension, and efficient development, is suitable for application systems of all scales and complexity levels. Whether for startup projects or large enterprise-level systems, JitAi can help teams continuously maintain development efficiency and system quality, simplify operations, reduce long-term evolution difficulty, and provide robust technical support for complex business scenarios.