5 of the Most EXCITING AI-Powered Tools for Software Developers
Oh no, AI is coming to take our jobs! Well, hopefully not! Instead, let's learn to use AI to improve the way we work! I'm very excited about the following tools right now...
Phind
Phind is particulary exciting to me because it's an AI-powered search engine designed for developers. It is powered by large language models like GPT-4 in order to provide answers, explanations and examples based on your search question. A typical response will be an article based on sources from all over the web, with citations included to back up the information, a bit like a dissertation.
Why it's Useful
- Quickly recieve an extremely readable answer in seconds
- See a list of sources so you can do further reading
- Saves time that you might usually spend Googling or searching StackOverflow
- You can tailor your search response to be more "expert", "concise" or "creative" in order to be more specific or not rely on web results at all.
Tabnine
Tabnine is an AI code assistant that is designed to help developers write code faster and more efficiently. According to tabnine.com, Tabnine uses AI to train a model based on a developer's specific code patterns, and then provides whole-line and full-function code completions based on that model. I rally enjoy using Tabnine in my VS Code as having smart code completion helps me to work a lot faster and generally improves me productivity as a result.
Why it's Useful:
- Free plan available.
- supports all programming languages and IDEs.
- Gets to know your specific code patterns, so the autocompletion is what you would expect.
Github Copilot
An AI pair programmer that makes suggestions in real time. Github.com states: "Spend less time creating boilerplate and repetitive code patterns, and more time on what matters: building great software. Write a comment describing the logic you want and GitHub Copilot will immediately suggest code to implement the solution." It costs $10 for the individual plan, but you can get a free trial. I've been giving the trial a go myself and I'm honestly blown away by the intelligence of the suggestions. Sometimes it knows exactly what to suggest purely from the name I've given to the function, or the my pseudo-code comments!
Why it's Useful
- AI based code suggestions based on your projects context and style conventions.
- Accept, reject or edit any of the suggestions (and get alternative suggestions).
- Especially useful if you're working in a language you're not that familiar with yet; helps you to learn as you code.
- Easily accessible as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).
Ask Codi
This is a really interesting one! According to askcodi.com: "AskCodi provides a complete tool that can be used by developers during the development process." It has many different tools that are useful for developers, whether you're a beginner or more experienced.
Why it's Useful:
- The web version has really nice user-friendly UI.
- Free to use (no credit card required, yay!) either in your web browser or as a code editor extension.
- So many different AI-powered tools! Intelligent chat bot, code generation, explanations, documentation, generate tests, database queries, script generators...and more!
- Saves your previous code generations / queries in a codebase so you can come back to them later.
...and of course, no list would be complete without:
ChatGPT
GPT4 in particular can assist you with just about almost anything, from code explanations, to name ideas for your app, to helping you write documentation. Just remember that it has a knowledge cutoff as of September 2021, so asking it about anything newer won't yield a great result.
Why it's Useful:
- Has a free tier, so is available to anyone.
- Great for generating a lot of ideas quickly and prompting creativity.
- A a developer, it can be useful as a helper for writing code, or even explaining existing code to aid in your understanding.
- Automate mundane and time-consuming tasks like generating a spreadsheet or putting a lot of items into a list.
- The possibilities already seem endless and we're just getting started!
There we have it! These are the top 5 AI powered tools that I've found myself using the most recently. They've saved me time, assisted my productivity and overall made me really excited about how I can use technology to improve the way I work! Go and try them out and let me know what you think! :)