About the AADL tooling

AI coding agents are getting good at writing and changing text-based models, and AADL models are no exception. But an agent that edits a model needs to know whether its changes are correct, and it needs to run analyses to see what the changes mean for the system. In OSATE, these steps happen in a graphical desktop application that is built for people, not for agents.

The AADL tooling closes this gap. It takes the AADL support at the core of OSATE and makes it available in Visual Studio Code and on the command line, where AI agents already do their work. People can use it too, of course, for example to edit AADL in Visual Studio Code or to check models automatically whenever they change.

The project is open source and hosted at https://github.com/osate/aadl-tooling.

Visual Studio Code extension

The AADL2 extension turns Visual Studio Code into an AADL editor. It marks errors as you type, suggests completions, jumps to definitions, and shows an outline of the model. An agent working in the editor sees the same error reports and can use the same commands to instantiate a model and run analyses on it.

The extension runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Command line tool

osate-cli offers the same checks and analyses as commands for a terminal or a script. Many AI agents work by running commands, and osate-cli lets them treat an AADL model like any other project they build and test. The tool keeps models loaded between commands, so checking a large model again after a small change is quick. It can also set up and manage workspaces with several projects that depend on each other.

osate-cli runs on macOS and Linux.

What is included

Both tools check models against the syntax and the rules of the AADL standard, including models that use the Error Model Annex or the Behavior Annex. They can create instance models and run analyses on them, including flow latency, bus load, and mode reachability.

Behind both tools is the same AADL implementation that OSATE uses. A model that passes the checks here passes them in OSATE, and the analyses give the same results.

How it fits with OSATE

The AADL tooling is not a replacement for OSATE. The graphical editor and most analyses and annexes are still only available in OSATE. Because both work on the same AADL files, a model an agent has worked on can be opened in OSATE for review or further analysis, and the other way around.

Each release of the tooling is built on a recent OSATE release. Feedback and bug reports are welcome in the issue tracker.

Getting started

To install the extension, search for AADL2 in the Extensions view of Visual Studio Code. It is also listed in the Visual Studio Marketplace and on Open VSX. No separate Java installation is needed.

On macOS, install osate-cli with Homebrew:

brew install osate/osate/osate-cli

Linux packages and downloadable archives are available on the releases page. Here, too, Java is included.