Covid came, and the world decided it would never be the same. The initial scare of COVID-19 soon transformed into a landslide of change and opportunity. The end of this once-in-a-century event saw the rise of AI, much like a new era breaking through the frost. A slew of coders had come together to work on an open-source project we now called Chat-GPT. Now everyone talks about no-code solutions, AI content generation and strategies, AI Coding Assistants and AI data analysis; AI seems to be everywhere.
But this change has posed a big challenge for companies that want to make the best use of this novel tech. How should one restructure their company now? How does AI help today’s coders?
In this blog, we will lay in front of you major players in AI Coding Assistance. We chose not to address every major tool in this blog, instead, we focused on major Coding Assistants in the market based on use cases the current technology has to offer.
Upon reading this article, we hope you will have better judgment on AI in Coding so you can make decisions best suited for your organization. We want you to make best use of the market of tools and opportunities that AI revolution has brought about with it.
But first, let’s understand AI.
The Age of AI… is 73 years Old
In 1951, the first AI programs materialized. A machine that could play Checkers, and another one that could play Chess. It took another decade for the code to be refined enough that it could challenge a respectable amateur. Arthur Samuel, working on IBM’s first commercial computer the IBM 701, popularized the word “machine learning” through this achievement.
Each year since then saw a new major development, and one step at a time, in 2024 AI has reached where Google DeepMind’s DNA prediction software AlphaFold can help identify cancer and genetic diseases.
AI Offerings Today
Chat GPT, Bing AI, Zapier, Jasper, Chatsonic, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney, SlidesAI, Paradox, TabNine, Dall E. We bet you know most of the aforementioned tools.
A simple Google search of “AI Tools for [insert your task]” will give you a slew of productive AI tools. Here are a few fields AI has penetrated on the date of publishing this article!
AI has seeped into almost every aspect of our lives and businesses.
With such a deep impacting technology, how to best adapt your organization? In this blog, we will talk about what AI has to offer to your coding team specifically. We want you to make informed decisions about your company based on the current and latest trends in the industry.
Choose Your AI Tool
While the list of AI coding tools is extremely long. In this blog, we chose only 4. GitHub Copilot, Codeium, Builder IO, and TabNine. This list is not extensive. There are many other AI Solutions that provide Coding assistance at individual as well as enterprise level.
To give you the big picture, we have chosen tools based on the various use cases they solve. Each tool discussed below is the king of its domain. Read on to find out how AI Assistants in the market are helping coders in 2024.
1. Github Copilot
Github Copilot is one of the few platforms that was widely used and popular even before the concept of “AI” Code Assistants gained mainstream.
Code Generation
GitHub Copilot excels at autocompletion, especially when writing repetitive statements like mapping logic. It can accurately predict the next line, allowing you to press the tab button repeatedly without needing to reference the source and destination POCO properties.
Researching
It’s an excellent tool for researching or generating ideas on how to solve problems and refining existing code. You can provide it with some code and request suggestions for improvement.
Testing your code
Writing tests is an essential but often tedious part of the software development lifecycle. GitHub Copilot, with its strong pattern recognition and completion capabilities, can accelerate the creation of unit tests, visual regression tests, and more.
Preparing for technical interviews
Preparing for technical interviews can be challenging, but GitHub Copilot can assist by generating code snippets, solving coding challenges, and offering alternative solutions. It helps you practice efficiently and explore different approaches, enhancing your understanding of key concepts needed for success in interviews.
Explaining Code
GitHub Copilot is useful for explaining code by providing comments, breaking down complex logic, and offering insights into how different parts of the code function. It can help clarify your code for others or even for your future self, ensuring better readability and understanding.
Language Translation
GitHub Copilot can assist with language translation by converting code from one programming language to another, such as translating Ruby into JavaScript. It recognizes patterns and syntax differences, making the translation process smoother and reducing the time spent manually rewriting code.
Debugging
GitHub Copilot can aid in debugging by suggesting potential fixes, identifying common issues, and providing explanations for errors in your code. Its pattern recognition helps pinpoint problems more quickly and suggests corrections to resolve bugs efficiently.
GitHub Copilot offers suggestions for many languages and frameworks, with particularly strong support for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, and C++.
2.Codeium
Another major game-changer in the field of AI Coding tools, this software has garnered a lot of headlines in recent past.
Being a product app is what makes Codeium unique and one of the leaders in its own space.
Since its launch in 2023, Codeium is now being used by some 600,000 developers (for free) and 1,000 enterprises (including Zillow, Dell, and Anduril). The company is about to release a new coding engine called Cortex, which it claims can process more data — up to 100 million lines of code — at once.
Now, enterprises can use Codeium for edits that need to be reflected across hundreds of thousands of code repositories in just a few button clicks.
3.Builder.io’s Visual Copilot
With the tagline “Design to Code. Automated.”, Visual Copilot has made it clear what its function would be in the development industry.
For instance, development teams can use their Figma plugin to convert designs into clean code, and even train the platform to code exactly the way they want.
Through the chat present inside Visual Copilot, users can make quick iterations to code or refactor elements for maximum reusability.
The icing on the cake: This tool includes responsivity automatically. Even when UI design files don’t use auto layout, Visual Copilot makes pages that are responsive with dynamic frontend components.
Builder IO also has a library of Frameworks that developers can use. React, Next.js, Qwik, Gatsby, Angular, Vue, and more. Using these intuitive Frameworks developers can work at ease and complete their projects with speed and accuracy, with clean code.
They also offer a lot more tools under the scope of coding assistance. You may try free versions of all the tools we list here and see what suits your taste best.
4.Tabnine
Tabnine assists coders in writing codes faster and saves extra typing. This tool handles mundane coding tasks spectacularly.
It also has a chat feature aptly named Tabnine Chat that is capable of providing help with high-level design, general questions about code, understanding instructions, etc.
In contrast to Copilot, which draws from public code repositories, Tabnine is developed using a carefully selected dataset of high-quality code with permissive licenses. This emphasis on code excellence makes Tabnine a preferred option for enterprise settings.
AI Integration
Our experts believe the list presented above is sufficient to tackle every aspect of AI Coding assistance that organizations demand, that technology right now allows. There are many more capable AI Tools in the market, available through a few simple clicks that may even be better at some tasks, compared to those in our list. If you think we missed any important tool that you use in your organization, do let us know! We are always eager to learn more from our peers!
What Can You Do
Engineers:
Fellow Engineers should visit the various AI Tools in the market, study their guides and resources, and start using the free versions to test the waters immediately.
The best way is to use tools to complete your current or personal project. Compare how it changes your way of coding.
Learning and adjusting to prompts, and other helpful features that the tools provide may take some time, so patience is key.
May the Force be with you.
Team Leads:
These tools are a boon for all the fellow team leads out there.
Use these tools and make sure that you know what all they can accomplish.
Team Leads, having more experience, can guide their team on how to judge if the solution provided by these coding assistants is optimal to use or not.
Pushing AI Coding tools for more information and more help should come easy to team leads, which will make it easier for them to plan the project and manage their teams in a better way
IT Heads:
People in the higher-ups should realize that the new AI tools in the market are a real game changer, and incorporating them into their workforce is currently essential.
However, we understand that it is tough to use tools for every available AI feature that the market has to offer. Our experts study your needs, and provide tailored solutions to you, which are best suited for maximizing output and improving the workflow. For solutions tailored to your clientele, projects, and the vision with which you run the company, visit our website.
AI Coding Assistants are experiencing a massive boom in the market. There have been massive investments in this field in the recent past, skyrocketing valuations. Cognition Labs, the creator of a viral “AI software engineer” called Devin, raised $175 million at a $2 billion valuation in April; coding automation company Magic is in talks to raise more than $200 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Then, there’s the giant in the room: Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot, which has 1.8 million paid subscribers and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2023. The race to the top is powered by AI. If you do not want to be left out, contact us to find out how we can help you. Established in 1999, we believe in building partnerships through hard work and trust. Jigya Software Services- An Orpine Inc Company.
