What is an AI Code Assistant?

AI has certainly revolutionized how we deal with our day-to-day life. We think AI is limited to Alexa which does whatever we ask her to do or an online chess game where it beats us. But did you know an AI code assistant can also complete the code for your software?

That’s right! AI code assistants, also known as code assistants, code autocomplete plugins, or code completion tools, enable software developers to write code faster and more accurately by using AI that will edit the code to achieve the desired results.

It helps a developer deal with many complex issues and achieve the desired results in less time and become highly productive while doing so.

AI-Powered Code Assistant & Its Uses

As most of the web will tell you, AI-Powered code assistant helps you get rid of writer’s block! Here are some uses that an organization could benefit from using an AI code assistant:

• Enhance Developer’s Productivity: An AI code assistant helps a developer to achieve results faster and more efficiently. He would otherwise have to spend more time writing the code and editing it. Using AI he can save that time he would have invested in writing the code with the help of AI and delivering the desired objective and testing his process.

• Extensive Usage in Specific Domain or on public & open source line code in general: It’s an AI-powered Code Assistant trained on many millions of Morphis-Tech private corporate lines of code, for specific domains, and on billions of public and open-source lines of code for general purpose.

• Helps You Fine Tune Custom Models. An AI code assistant based on your organization’s standards, knowledge, and patterns fine tunes a custom model best suited to specific custom purposes of coding

• Supports Natural Language:  Getting guidance from an AI might seem like too much weight lifting but an AI code assistant supports natural language to aid the programmer in telling a text story about the code they want to write

AI code assistant aids the programmer with the tedious process of writing the same code in different places by considering context and millions of programming codes in different languages so it can offer you exact predictions.

Here’s a list of top code completion tools that use AI Technology

• Tabnine: This particular code completion tool multiplies your productivity by combining a revolutionary public code model with an accurate customized algorithm. It learns the codes, patterns & preferences of your organization/team and models its code assistance basis.

The code assistant delivers better results with experience. Every time a programmer or a team member from said organization uses the app its performance & accuracy increase.

If privacy & compliance is your top concern, this code assistant would be the best choice for you. It runs on your local computer & wouldn’t share your date and code. So your team has complete control over the data leading to data security & compliance.

The code assistant as it uses global best coding practices can help you get rid of unnecessary test and development expenses while delivering accurate 

code faster.

• Kite: Kite helps the programmer code faster and achieve the desired results. It supports over 16 languages and code editors. A couple of reasons to use Kite are:

• Helps your program context-aware codes.

• The ML model is trained over 25 million files. The code assistant gives you multi-line completion where you would typically get none.

• They on average cut down your keystrokes by 47%.   

• Helps document lookup for python and gives details on how to & real-life helpful examples.          

Kite is compatible with 12+ languages that include Java,, PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Typescript, Kotlin, and Ruby. If you opt for its freemium account, you will also get support for Python.

• GitHub Copilot

Train on over billions of lines of code, this code assistant turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps you write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. 

GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pre-trained language model created by OpenAI. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).

Their recent evaluation, it showed that users accepted on average 26% of all completions shown by GitHub Copilot. It was also determined that on average more than 27% of developers’ code files were generated by GitHub Copilot, and in certain languages like Python that goes up to 40%. 

However, GitHub Copilot like any AI Powered code assistant does not write perfect code. It is designed to generate the best code possible given the context it has access to, but it doesn’t test the code it suggests so the code may not always work, or even make sense. GitHub Copilot can only hold a very limited context, so it may not make use of helpful functions defined elsewhere in your project or even in the same file. And it may suggest old or deprecated uses of libraries and languages. When converting comments written in non-English to code, there may be performance disparities when compared to English. For suggested code, certain languages like Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Go might perform better compared to other programming languages.

• Visual Studio Intellicode

The code assistant is from the family of Microsoft and comes integrated with Microsoft’s IDE named Visual Studio. In visual studio, it supports C# and XAML, while also compatible with Java, Python, Javascript, and Typescript in visual studio code.

IntelliCode can provide recommendations based on your code and seamlessly share them across your team. With this preview feature, you can build a team model to provide recommendations on code that isn’t in the open source domain, such as methods on your own utility classes or domain-specific library calls

In addition to statement completion signature help, IntelliCode also makes argument recommendations to help you choose the right argument quickly.

• Pycharm

PyCharm is a dedicated Python Integrated Development Environment (IDE) providing a huge range of essential tools for Python developers, tightly integrated to create a convenient environment for productive Python, web, and data science development.

The prime advantage with PYcharm is it comes with a keyboard-centric approach which makes you do coding easily saving time.

Other advantages of Pycharm include error checking, seamless project navigation & quick fixes

• Amazon Code whisperer: The New AI Code Assistant

 The new code assistant has just hit the market and is now available to programmers for preview. The tool joins these existing players on the market.

The developer tool can essentially auto-complete entire functions and save a huge amount of developers’ time, in addition, support multiple languages and IDEs. According to an Amazon Web Services post quoted by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist of AWS. “CodeWhisperer, which is trained on billions of lines of code from a diverse set of data, uses contextual clues to drive code completion recommendations that developers can accept as is or modify, according to AWS.”

One of the best uses that the software has is to create code snippets from text programmer inputs in natural language into source files. The code whisperer will on its own locate the required technology to perform the task even if performing the task requires the use of other technologies like cloud service or library. Programmers can save time by using the code whisperer to perform tasks such as building buckets or data storage repositories in AWS’s well-reputed Amazon S3 storage service.

Despite the several benefits that these AI-powered code assistants offer it has several drawbacks that a programmer should take into account while using the tool. The tools many of the times have unproven efficiency, and limited performance & sometimes are tied to a specific infrastructure. As with any technology, it’s best to use these with caution.