Artificial Intelligence1 min read

How AI-assisted development helped us build the new Dropbox experience

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The rollout introduces features that allow users to ask questions regarding project updates, organize messy folders, and merge multiple documents into single PDFs. Engineers met a strict November deadline by sharing code between web and desktop interfaces instead of creating separate builds. Development was accelerated using AI to handle implementation and testing tasks, which were then submitted for human review. Furthermore, a prototype built during a May hackathon successfully evaluated integration methods like embedding Electron web views and importing individual web components.

Key points

  • Shared cross-platform code enabled the desktop application to inherit web capabilities wi…: Shared cross-platform code enabled the desktop application to inherit web capabilities without requiring teams to rebuild features independently.
  • Artificial intelligence tools expedited the software cycle by tracing dependencies, manag…: Artificial intelligence tools expedited the software cycle by tracing dependencies, managing integration testing, and generating code for human review.
  • The updated file management platform provides automated tools for grouping folders, combi…: The updated file management platform provides automated tools for grouping folders, combining PDFs, and renaming files based on their contents.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

For three years, we’ve been working toward a new Dropbox experience that helps people do more with their files, from finding a project decision to getting a folder ready to share. Today, we’re beginning to roll that experience out to customers. But getting here meant changing how we build software. We had complex integrations to tackle and a deadline to meet, and AI-assisted development helped us take on work that would've previously been difficult to complete in time for launch.

The new Dropbox experience puts that investment into practice by helping customers understand what’s in their files and get work done with them. Ask Dropbox what changed in a project folder, and it answers with sources you can open and check. Ask it to organize a folder, rename files based on their contents, or combine documents into a PDF, and it shows a plan you can review and edit before approving. Dropbox only reads and acts on content you already have permission to access, and supported file changes can be undone. And the results stay in Dropbox, where teams can…

Artificial Intelligence