AI EngineBuilt for teams who ship fast & care about code quality
Engineered for backend testing precision, depth, and reliability.
The Kerno Engine compiles a deep map of your code, gates every step behind deterministic guardrails, hardens every test with adversarial reviews, and sharpens with distributed learning. That's why it's the most thorough and most trustworthy AI engine in backend testing.
4.Your coding agents are built to be good at many things. The Kerno Engine is built to be exceptional at one: backend testing.
Part 013D view
Compile Code Intelligence
The accuracy of every test rests on how deeply the engine understands the code beneath it. The deeper that understanding, the more precise the tests.
Code Intelligence Engine4 specs
Part 023D view
Compose the Test Plan
To plan a surface, Kerno walks its call graph, every caller and callee, mapping what the code touches, which permissions guard it, and how it can fail. It then designs the exact scenarios those paths demand, across every endpoint, task, queue, and scheduled job. That grounding is where Kerno's precision comes from.
Planning Engine4 specs
Part 033D view
Execute the Suite
The execution engine gates every scenario behind deterministic guardrails and hardens every result with adversarial reviews. This is where Kerno's reliability comes from. Every verdict is produced by the same deterministic checks, so results stay consistent and hold up in review and in CI.
Execution Engine4 specs
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Learn Your Standards
The learning engine applies your team's standards on every run and mints its own lessons from what each run proves, keeping what holds and retiring what goes stale. This is the distributed learning that sharpens Kerno over time.
Learning Engine4 specs
Part 053D view
Detect the Drift
Drift detection is fully deterministic. Kerno decides whether your code's behavior changed or a test simply broke from the exact class of error a run throws, turns each real change into a tripwire that fires if that behavior ever moves again, and replays the whole suite in CI with no model in the loop. That determinism is what makes a Kerno diff trustworthy.
Drift Detection Engine4 specs
Part 063D view
Scale to Any Codebase
A model's reasoning degrades as its context fills, well before it hits the limit. Kerno treats context as a budget it actively manages, splitting the work into small tasks and feeding each one only the exact slice of code it needs from an index. That is how Kerno stays precise on a codebase of any size.
The Context Engine4 specs
DWG E-01Kerno engine · general assembly
Rev2026.10
Scale1 : 1
Sheet1 of 6
Kerno operator manual · FAQ9 questions
FAQ
FAQs
Got any extra questions? Reach out on our community channel and we'll be happy to help.
01What is the Kerno Engine?+
The Kerno Engine is an AI engine built for backend testing. A model plans and writes the tests for every surface of your backend, deterministic guardrails decide which ones count, and it runs against your real stack and replays in CI on every change.
02How is Kerno different from asking an AI agent to write tests?+
Kerno's model plans and writes the scenarios, then the engine gates every step behind deterministic guardrails and hardens each result with an adversarial review before it counts. It plans from your call graph, keeps a baseline of how your backend behaves, and replays the suite in CI on every change.
03How does Kerno maintain its tests as my code changes?+
On each run it reads what your change touched, keeps the coverage that still holds, updates only the scenarios that moved, and retires the ones your code no longer supports. A small change produces a small update sized to what actually moved.
04What kinds of tests does Kerno generate?+
Kerno generates functional scenarios by default and security scenarios, mapped to the OWASP API and Web Top 10, on demand. Where it has a database or dependency connection it verifies side effects too, the rows written, messages queued, and downstream calls made, alongside the response. It tests black-box over HTTP or white-box with direct access to your state.
05How does Kerno prevent false passes?+
Every scenario passes an adversarial review before it counts. Kerno rejects a test that weakens its own assertion, hardcodes an id, or leaves its cleanup unverified, and a stub that was never implemented is never scored as a pass.
06Does Kerno test background jobs and queues?+
Yes. Kerno tests every surface of your backend, including HTTP endpoints, background tasks, queue consumers, scheduled jobs, and MCP tools, discovering and testing each as its own kind of entry point.
07Which languages and frameworks does Kerno support?+
Kerno reads every major backend language, from TypeScript and Python to Go, Rust, Ruby, PHP, C#, Java, Kotlin, and Scala. It resolves each framework's own wiring too, with dedicated discovery for Django, AWS SAM and Lambda, Celery, and SQS. HTTP routes and async task handlers are both found.
08Does Kerno do black-box or white-box testing?+
Both. With database access Kerno seeds and verifies state directly. Without it, Kerno tests over HTTP, and it blocks any scenario the environment cannot satisfy up front.
09Does Kerno touch my production data?+
No. Kerno connects to the environment you point it at and runs against the dependencies you already run. You decide what it can access, and every scenario is checked against that access before a request is made.
