What is agentic development

Agentic development uses AI to turn a natural language description of the outcome you want into applications using prompts in a conversation. Autonomous app development is agentic development on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

• In one approach to agentic development, you describe a problem or an application in natural language and have AI generate it without reviewing the underlying code.
• In another approach, AI tools work alongside developers to suggest code, auto-complete functions, and explain existing code, with developers reviewing and guiding the output.

Figure 1. Agentic development approaches

Agentic development encompasses a range of approaches to AI-assisted app building:

• In one approach, developers provide a goal and deploy the generated output without reviewing the underlying code.
• In another approach, agentic development is an iterative, conversational process in which developers guide AI generation, review the output, and retain responsibility for the generated code.

ServiceNow provides tools to help you review, refine, and test apps throughout agentic development, including Build Agent and Now Assist for Creator.

Though testing and deployment are not always part of an agentic development workflow, they are covered in this document to account for all phases of development. Governance is also included in apps that are built agentically on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Some agentic development workflows do not include reviewing or adjusting generated code, for example in ServiceNow Studio or the ServiceNow IDE. However, this document includes information on those processes for developers who want to refine generated output further.

Agentic development enables users across skill levels to build apps by prompting, accelerating the app creation cycle.