Exploring popular AI Tools for Streamlined Development

I've been using Copilot in class for a while now, and I've been introduced to Cursor AI as well recently. Which brought me to the question: What other AI tools exist to make my life as a developer easier? Well, I've been searching around different platforms and blogs to find other developers' opinions. In this blog we'll discuss 5 AI tools that kept popping up in my research.

GitHub Copilot

I'm going to start with GitHub Copilot. For students who don't know about it or haven't used it. You should. It's an AI tool powered by OpenAI's Codex. It can autocomplete code, from small lines to whole code blocks! This will make setting up your components, hooks, and APIs much easier. Thanks to it's ability to read language prompts, it's able to turn your ideas into code without needing to search for a specific syntax. In my experience, it's very fast and mostly accurate at the same time, which makes it worth investing in. You can even get it for free if you're a student.

CursorAI

So this is an AI tool that I've been using recently with it's own code editor. It's pretty wild to be honest. Compared to GitHub Copilot, which is more focused on inline suggestions, Cursor AI can suggest multiple lines of code while looking at your whole project. It also tries to predict where you're going to edit next. At first glance it's pretty amazing, but I've noticed it's not always perfect trying to predict some code. Sometimes it even comes up with irrelevant code for my component. It's still learning, but to me it's still a pretty solid choice. I like UI and how fast and easy it is to just ask something of the AI. Definitely my go-to right now.

Tabnine

So next up is Tabnine, an industry-leading AI code assistant. Tabnine has been ranked 1st and 2nd place for all 5 Use Cases in the Gartner Critical Capabilities for AI Code Assistants. It is compatible with lots of IDE's and loved by a lot of developers. It has things like code completion, code explanation, and fixed/refactoring that other AI tools also have. I've been looking around for opinions of other developers that use Tabnine. Most of them prefer it over Copilot, saying Tabnine has about 90% accuracy on the autocomplete, compared to Copilot being less accurate with about 80%. You can even create or set up a component in mere seconds with the AI chat that will also explain to you how the component works. Compared to the other AI tools above, there is no free option in their plans & pricing except for the free trial. I would like to try it out for my next project though!

DeepCode (Snyk Code)

Deepcode, which is a part of Snyk Code, is a tool that analyses code for vulnerabilities, bugs, and potential performance issues. It supports multiple programming languages, highlighting problematic lines and giving the level of vulnerability. You can use it as an extension in your IDE and have a dashboard, where you can set up your organisation and custom rules. DeepCode AI produces trustworthy results by scanning the code for issues, understanding the context to fix it, and rescanning it to validate their suggestion. It will only suggest to the developer if it validated it's own code. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet, but to me it looks like a nice tool to secure my builds. They do offer a free plan, but it doesn't include a Jira integration, a project management and issue-tracking tool.

Cody

Cody is an AI assistant designed to analyse and understand your entire codebase. Using RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, it is able to understand your code and generate the most contextually-accurate code in return. It uses the latest LLMs, choosing between Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, and Mixtral for the chat as well. Choosing between different models depending on power or speed based on your needs. The AI tool is affordable, offering a free plan, a pro plan of $9 per month, and the enterprise plan for larger teams of $19 per user/month. For me, it looks quite useful since I notice some AI's missing the context of my code when I'm requesting their help. The only letdown for me is their UI and the way they return a generated code. But other than that, it's performance and speed look quite nice, so I will give it a try soon and update it you guys on that!

Conclusion

So there you have it! These are the 5 AI tools that have consistently popped up in my research. Each one has its own perks, whether it’s Copilot’s free student access or Cody’s more in-depth code comprehension. If you ask me, trying them all out (at least on a free trial if they have one) is the best way to see which one fits your coding style. For now, I’ll probably keep sticking with Cursor AI for a little bit since I've just started using it, but I might try out Tabnine for one of my next projects. I’ll keep you all posted on how these tools evolve and if I end up swapping them out for something else. Let me know which AI tool you’re most excited to try, or if there’s another hidden gem I should check out! 😃