Robocorp VS Code Extension and Action Server rebranding to Sema4.ai

Since Robocorp was acquired by Sema4.ai in January 2024, we have been busy building the vital components of AI Agents to become generally available. You can read more about our vision for building, running, and managing enterprise AI Agents on our website.

As we gear up for our first Sema4.ai product launches, we have restructured some of the components we previously offered, without removing any features from the current Robocorp Automation platform users.

The Robocorp Code extension for VS Code has become the Sema4.ai extension for VS Code

The new Sema4.ai extension for VS Code retains all the functionality of Robocorp Code. In addition, it will get a lot of new AI agent-related features moving forward.

🔔 Your action is needed! 🔔

• Remove the Robocorp Code extension from the VS Code. This is done by navigating to Extensions from the left sidebar, locating Robocorp Code, and clicking “Uninstall”.

• Install the new Sema4.ai Extension from the Marketplace, or by searching for it through the VS Code Extensions panel.

Robocorp Code is deprecated and will not receive any updates after September 30, 2024. Please make sure to install the new Sema4.ai extension by this date. This change has no impact on your current automations deployed to the Control Room - they continue to operate normally.

Apart from supporting everything the automation developer needs for building the Tasks, here are some recent additions:

• AI Actions complete workflow: from bootstrapping from the provided templates to debugging to publishing them to Sema4.ai Studio.

• Completely renewed inspectors and recorders for web, Windows, Java and image-based automations. Have a look at the recording of our recent Product Hour Live for all the details.

• Better environment management when working on Python - when you change any dependencies, it’ll ask if you want to update the environment.

For a detailed list of features, visit the change log.

Rebranding AI Actions and Action Server

Thank you to the community members for the great feedback during the developer preview period. You all helped us shape the Actions and Action Server to be a top-notch method for connecting new capabilities to AI agents.

To prepare for general availability, we have made the following naming changes:

• AI Actions and Action Server moved from robocorp/robocorp GitHub repository to sema4ai/actions.

• Renamed Robocorp Action Server to Sema4.ai Action Server.

• PyPi package changed from robocorp-actions to sema4ai-actions.

This brings slight changes to using the packages, while features remain the same or more.

Working on a Mac, you should remove the old versions and install a new:

In your Action code, the import changes like this:

We have added loads of new features in the Actions and Action Server, and here are some of the most important ones.

• Hot reload of actions when the package directory changes

• Support for parsing Custom Types in Action Server UI action run view

• Console output added to Action Server UI action run view

• Support OAuth2 secrets as Action arguments, and in the Action Server UI

• Stable public URL link to Action Server UI if started with --expose

• Support for action-server package build, extract, metadata, and update (for publishing to future Sema4.ai products)

• Automatic version handling by the Sema4.ai platform

• Customizable action display names in openapi.json using @action(display_name="<Action name>")

• An environment built only once, no longer checked/made pristine on server start to save time

For full details, have a look at the change log in the repository.

Early Access to AI Agents

We are excited to bring you the best of automation and unlock your journey towards AI Agents. To stay updated on the new releases from Sema4.ai, sign up for early access to Sema4.ai Agents here.