# Axelera’s Voyager Wingman Pitches 20-30% Better Results Than Claude Code for Edge AI Development > Source: > Published: 2026-07-16 15:14:48+00:00 Axelera AI has launched Voyager Wingman, an AI-powered assistant designed to accelerate development with its Voyager Toolkit. The tool was first shown at CES in January and has since undergone extensive testing ahead of this broader release. Wingman lets developers use natural language to query the Voyager SDK and Axelera’s full documentation set, helping them build AI pipelines, debug issues, and troubleshoot applications without manually digging through reference docs. Axelera’s internal testing puts Wingman’s results 20-30% ahead of using Claude Code on its own. Building AI applications for dedicated hardware involves a fair amount of overhead beyond the model itself: exporting and compiling models, configuring pipelines, tuning for performance, and validating outputs all take time. Wingman is meant to sit atop that process as an assistant, with direct access to Axelera’s SDK, documentation, and the full software repository, rather than requiring developers to piece that context together themselves. Axelera, a European AI semiconductor company behind the Metis and Europa edge inference platforms, says its hardware is deployed across more than 500 customers spanning telecommunications, aerospace, and enterprise sectors. **Core Functionality** Wingman is built around four areas where Axelera says developers tend to spend the most time. The first is pipeline construction, where developers can describe the application they want, including models, pre- and post-processing steps, or multi-stage pipelines, and Wingman helps assemble a working computer vision pipeline from that description. The second is performance tuning. Wingman can suggest specific optimization techniques and compiler configurations to maximize throughput on Axelera’s hardware, rather than leaving developers to work through the compiler options on their own. Third is troubleshooting. Wingman is built to recognize common failure patterns, including configuration errors, device enumeration issues, and failed model compilations, and to point developers toward a fix rather than just surfacing the error. The fourth area is documentation access. Developers can ask direct questions about supported operators, APIs, runtime behavior, or configuration syntax and receive a contextual answer with examples, rather than searching through reference material. **Access and Deployment** Voyager Wingman is now available as a web-based chat interface and a standalone app. A plugin or skill for existing AI coding frameworks is planned for a later release. Across all of these access points, Wingman is designed to automatically stay current with Toolkit updates, new examples, and documentation changes, without requiring developers to download or manually update anything. The web-based chat gives developers access from any platform via a single link, simplifying onboarding for teams that don’t want to install anything locally. Once the plugin or skill ships, it’s intended to integrate into existing developer workflows without requiring changes to their setup or exposing source code externally. **Availability** Voyager Wingman is accessible through the Axelera Developer Community and Customer Portal. The chat version runs on a freemium model, giving developers a free credit allowance to try the assistant before committing to paid usage. The standalone app is free to use on a bring-your-own-key basis, meaning developers supply their own API credentials for the underlying model. Bram Verhoef, VP of Customer Engineering and Success at Axelera, said the platform’s goal is to make edge AI development on Axelera hardware accessible to developers of all experience levels, not just specialists already familiar with the Voyager Toolkit.