Higson 4.3: AI Agent for Rule Authoring, Smarter Diagnostics, and Better Performance

Higson 4.3 is the release where AI becomes an assistant working side-by-side with your team inside Higson Studio - and where you, as a user, get even better performance. Here's what the latest Higson release brings.

Higson AI Assistant (beta)

The headline functional addition in 4.3 is the integrated Higson AI Agent, available in beta. It runs directly inside Higson Studio and helps both business users and developers move faster on the tasks that have historically slowed rules-based projects down.

With the AI Assistant, you can:

• Generate functions from a natural-language description. Describe the logic you want to implement and the AI Assistant returns a working implementation in Groovy or Python. No more switching to a code editor for a five-line calculation.
• Modify and refine existing functions. Point the Agent at a function in your codebase and describe the change you want - the AI Assistant edits in place, preserving structure and style.
• Conversationally design decision tables. Describe the business requirement; the AI Assistant drafts the conditions, outcomes, and table structure, then suggests ways to simplify it.

This isn't a separate AI tool you have to switch into. It's built into the same Studio your team uses every day, with full access to your domain model, context types, and rule history.

Why this matters?

Higson 4.2 added the ability to run your own ML models (ONNX) inside rules. Higson 4.3 closes that loop from the other side: AI now also helps you author and maintain those rules.

Diagnostic Panel - find bottlenecks in minutes

If you run Higson at scale - thousands of decision tables, millions of rows in matrices, complex flows - you probably know the situation: the configuration runs slower than expected, and your team spends days analyzing rules to find the bottleneck. The new Diagnostic Panel introduces an audit and profiling mechanism for Runtime activity.

Every rule invocation is recorded in the database as a detailed "dump" - including the request breakdown and execution statistics. The data is analyzed inside Higson Studio and presented as visual flamegraphs, heatmaps, and interactive charts, similar to those users know from developer-grade profilers. The analysis is also available from within the tester.

The Diagnostic Panel itself has been designed for easy extension with additional modules.

Lighter versioning and faster snapshot export.

Every LTS release in Higson is built on a simple principle: meaningful new features plus measurable performance gains. Where version 4.2 reduced snapshot import times almost tenfold versus 4.0, version 4.3 focuses on versioning itself - the mechanism that underpins branching, time-based versioning, and configuration history.

In 4.3, we rebuilt key components of the versioning engine to:

• Significantly reduce memory usage when working with large configurations.
• Speed up snapshot export and import, particularly between versions.

Asynchronous configuration import with automatic failover

Importing large configurations - typical during a migration from another rules engine or a quarterly rate refresh - is no longer a risk point. In Higson 4.3, imports run asynchronously: the user uploads the package, receives confirmation in seconds, and can close the browser. Processing continues in the background, and the status is visible in a dedicated screen inside Higson Studio.

The critical change is failure resilience. If the Higson Studio instance handling the import is restarted, another instance in the cluster automatically takes over the job. The checksum mechanism skips files that have already been imported - no duplicates, no restart from scratch. All coordination happens through the database you already have.

Granular permissions management

As Higson rolls out across more enterprise environments, one question becomes critical: who can do what - across products, lines of business, and environments. Higson 4.3 introduces a redesigned permission layer that lets you define role-based access tied to profiles.

In practice, this means:

• Product owners can edit their own products' configurations without touching others.
• Users can edit only specific elements within an assigned profile.
• External consultants can be granted read-only access scoped to a single profile.

Every change is still attributed to its author and subject to a full audit trail - critical in the context of NAIC guidance on AI governance and the growing body of state-level legal requirements (in the U.S.) on model transparency.

License Protection and Full Lifecycle Visibility

As the platform has matured, it became necessary to introduce a mechanism for monitoring license usage. Higson 4.3 introduces a new license protection system with Runtime usage diagnostics and clear notifications inside Higson Studio about upcoming renewal deadlines.

From now on, users:

• Receive clear, progressive notifications about expiring licenses, without blocking the Runtime.
• Get improved service support - environment analysis based on a diagnostic file.
• Benefit from greater security - easy detection of system use approaching license expiration thanks to visible, escalating alerts.
• Maintain consistency with the Diagnostic Panel - license and diagnostic data become part of a broader monitoring ecosystem.

Alongside the production license, we are also introducing a developer license, which our clients can use to power pre-production environments: test, development, and staging - enabling work within Higson Studio 4.3.

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For clients migrating from earlier versions of Higson, we encourage reaching out for a developer license at: oktawia.jakubik@decerto.com.

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Users interested in testing Higson can now run the environment on their own infrastructure and work with Higson for 3 months under a developer license, with no obligations.

What this means for the LTS lifecycle

Higson follows a Long-Term Support (LTS) release model: we support the three most recent LTS versions. With version 4.3 entering General Availability, the oldest supported LTS 4.0 will be retired per this policy.

If you're currently running version 4.0, contact us about an upgrade path - we'll help you estimate the scope and plan the full process before your current LTS loses official support.

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