VAST Platform AI Assistant: Integrating LLMs into a Live Smalltalk Environment

About this event

Smalltalk environments have long been pioneers in developer productivity. With the VAST Platform AI Assistant, Instantiations is extending that tradition by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into the VAST platform. This new tool is designed to bring AI capabilities directly into your daily workflow.

In this session, Johan, Kris, and Mariano will share a user experience report and a live demonstration of the assistant’s current capabilities, powered by Google’s Gemini.

You’ll see how it goes beyond simple chat by directly interacting with the live VAST image through the LLM’s “tools” capabilities. This allows investigating source code as it responds to your questions.

These examples will demonstrate how the VAST Platform AI Assistant leverages the live nature of Smalltalk to act as a true pair programmer.

We’ll also look ahead at our enterprise-focused roadmap, including support for local models to ensure privacy and security, integration with additional LLM providers, and our vision for deeper IDE-level capabilities and Runtime Intelligence.

Join us to explore how we are shaping the future of AI-assisted development in VAST to better empower software developers. See it in action, try it out, and join the conversation on GitHub.

Johan Brichau is a seasoned software engineer with over 25 years of experience across a wide range of Smalltalk environments. He joined the VAST Platform development team at Instantiations in January 2025. Prior to that, he spent nearly 15 years as co-founder and CTO of Yesplan, a world-leading online venue management platform. Johan holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2005) and has actively contributed to several open source projects.

Kris Gybels recently joined Instantiations to work on the VAST Platform’s AI-based tool support. He previously spent a number of years in academia researching Declarative Meta Programming and its application to Aspect-Oriented Programming, and over a decade co-developing the Yesplan venue management system, during which he made a number of contributions to Pharo, most notably Pharo 12’s improved Mac ‘Retina display’ support, as well as to Seaside and its Parasol web testing framework.

Mariano Martinez Peck is a systems engineer specializing in dynamic programming language software. In 2018, he joined Instantiations to further develop the VAST Platform through the addition of new frameworks, libraries and tools, as well as improving the existing code base of VAST. He is active in the Smalltalk development community, and has used his expertise to co-author numerous open source projects. Mariano has a PhD in Computer Science, and his academic research has been published across various international journals. In addition to his development duties, he currently leads the VAST Platform engineering team at Instantiations. In his personal time, Mariano enjoys traveling as well as outdoor activities like camping and fishing.