IRIS Forge already puts industrial app creation in the hands of engineers and operators. The VS Code Extension takes it further — into the development environment where technical teams do their best work.
Every industrial organization has a backlog of applications that should exist but don’t — monitoring dashboards, alerts views, health score tools built around the way operations actually work. These aren’t difficult ideas. They’re held back by development cycles that stretch into months, by handoffs and testing and deployment timelines that move slower than the operations they’re meant to serve.
The constraint isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a development process that can’t keep pace with industrial operations.
IRIS Forge: from idea to deployed application in a single session
IRIS Forge, built on the IRIS Foundry industrial AI platform, was designed to close that gap. Engineers and operators describe what they need in plain language and Forge generates a production-ready application — UI components, data connections, and application logic, created automatically in minutes. Forge draws on the data sources, asset hierarchies, and namespaces already configured in IRIS Foundry, so the applications it produces start from an accurate model of your specific environment, not a generic template.
Since its introduction, Forge has delivered up to ten times faster deployment and reduced development costs by up to 90% — not by simplifying what gets built, but by eliminating the friction in how it gets built.
Introducing the IRIS Forge VS Code Extension
IRIS Forge in the browser puts application creation within reach of engineers and operators who don’t have a development background. But many of the technical users building on Forge — data engineers, software developers, architects — work primarily in an IDE. For them, switching to a browser interface to build and iterate creates overhead that accumulates across every session.
The IRIS Forge VS Code Extension brings the full Forge workflow directly into Visual Studio Code. Developers describe what they want to build, and Forge generates the complete application codebase into a local working folder — immediately visible and editable in the IDE. A local development server launches automatically for preview at localhost. Refinements work the same way: a follow-up prompt in VS Code tells Forge what to change, and Forge applies it.
Forge handles natural language, so instructions don’t need to be precisely worded to be understood correctly. Any previously deployed or draft Forge application can also be opened from the extension, downloaded, and edited — with registration and deployment back to Foundry available from within VS Code.
One platform, every kind of builder
The VS Code Extension doesn’t create a separate track for developers. It extends the same Forge workflow — same Foundry data foundation, same AI-assisted generation, same governed deployment pipeline — into the environment where technical users already work. A domain expert can define the initial prompt in the browser. A developer can open that same application in VS Code, refine it, and deploy it. The output is consistent in quality and compliance regardless of who built which part.
Every application created through the VS Code Extension inherits IRIS Foundry’s enterprise governance framework: role-based access controls, audit logging, data lineage, and the compliance standards already in place across the organization. The flexibility of a native IDE, within the governance guardrails industrial operations require.
The applications that were too slow to build are no longer too slow to build. They are one session away — whether that session happens in a browser or an IDE.
Ready to build? Get in touch with the SymphonyAI Industrial team to learn more about IRIS Forge and the VS Code Extension.
