There’s hardly an industry today that’s not being revolutionized by AI. Whether fashion, automobile, healthcare, or education, AI is bleeding into every industry vertical and completely changing its facets through innovation. One of the most prominent verticals is software development, where AI completely transforms how code is written.
Code writing has forever been a tedious job for software professionals. However, AI coding tools have emerged as the best solution, automating coding cycles and allowing developers to automate mundane coding tasks.
To help you understand better, we’ve curated this blog that not only explains why you must use AI coding assistants but also highlights the best AI coding tools you can use today. Let’s dive right in!
What is an AI coding assistant?
An AI coding assistant, also simply known as an AI coding tool, is a software application or tool that uses AI and machine learning to help write, review, and improve code. These AI coding assistant tools are designed to streamline coding processes, offering various functionalities, such as:
- Code autocompletion: predicting and suggesting code as a developer type, simplifying the coding process significantly.
- Code refactoring: restructuring and optimizing existing code, making it more efficient, readable, and maintainable.
- Error detection and debugging: identifying potential bugs or errors in the code and providing suggestions for fixes.
- Code analysis: adhering to coding standards, best practices, and style guidelines, ensuring consistency across codebases through deep code analysis.
- Language translation: translating code between various programming languages and offering multi-language support.
- Code search and documentation: offering relevant code snippets or documentation to help understand or implement specific code functionalities.
- Learning and adaptation: learning from prior code patterns and developer interactions to provide more precise coding suggestions over time.
Why should you use an AI code assistant?
As mentioned above, AI tools that can generate code are extremely helpful and increase developer productivity through seamless automation. Here are some more benefits that prove why you should be using AI coding assistants:
- Learning and skill enhancement: these coding assistants allow developers to learn new coding techniques, patterns, and best practices through in-depth explanations.
- Debugging: instead of spending hours in manual code debugging, AI coding tools can automate the process to detect issues or bugs and boost code quality automatically.
- Consistency: AI tools for coding are designed to help maintain consistency across coding projects by enforcing coding standards and best practices.
- Collaboration and knowledge sharing: these coding tools also offer documentation access and code examples, helping developers understand and implement their desired functionalities hassle-free.
- Better onboarding: For new developers or those transitioning to new frameworks or languages, AI code assistants can drastically reduce the learning curve and accelerate the onboarding process.
Best AI coding assistants and tools
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of using AI coding tools, here are the 11 best coding assistants to use today.
1. GitHub Copilot
One of the best AI coding tools for beginners, GitHub Copilot, is an extremely robust coding assistant that helps developers craft high-quality code without much effort.
This tool is powered by the OpenAI Codex language model, which is trained on natural language text and obtains insights from extensive amounts of public code. In a nutshell, this intelligent AI coding assistant suggests entire lines of code, writes comments, completes functions, and even helps spot potential security threats.
Key features
- It works with most of the industry-standard IDEs.
- It provides seamless extensions for Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Neovim.
- It helps developers cycle through multiple auto-complete suggestions easily.
- It offers real-time code suggestions and functions.
- It offers information-rich comments to help developers better understand their code.
2. Divi AI
Divi AI is a highly advanced AI code tool for WordPress websites. Divi AI is extremely aware of Divi Models, allowing developers to get codes that work seamlessly for WordPress websites. This AI tool is built to automatically select the ideal selectors of a developer’s module and apply the requested CSS to them.
Key features
- It works with free-form code modules for creating unique solutions based on plain-language prompts.
- It offers unlimited code generation, along with image and content generation.
- It ensures rapid code optimizations through code-quick features.
- Using generative AI, it also offers the ability to customize any element on a WordPress page.
3. Replit
Replit is an online coding platform that acts as an interactive space for developers to code, learn, and collaborate. One of its best offerings is Ghostwriter, an AI-driven assistant that streamlines coding. Trained on millions of code lines, Ghostwriter offers contextually relevant code suggestions, making it a valuable tool for developers of any experience.
Key features
- It auto-completes code to speed up the coding process, ensuring minimal errors.
- It enables programmers to learn how to code within their documents.
- It explains and comments code to help new developers learn and upskill in no time.
- It automatically detects code errors and provides suggestions to fix them.
4. AskCodi
AskCodi is also one of the best AI coding assistant tools for developers today. It’s driven by OpenAI Codex, which allows it to generate code rapidly, answer programming questions, and offer real-time code suggestions. All a developer needs to do is install the AskCodi extension on their preferred IDE, and their coding process will get streamlined.
Key features
- It generates code from plain language prompts.
- It helps with creating DocStrings and also provides SQL query generation.
- It answers coding questions in an easy-to-understand manner, making it ideal for beginner-level programmers too.
- It offers a stress-free coding experience by helping developers with seamless code generation and code query answers.
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5. Sourcegraph Cody
Sourcegraph Cody is another AI coding assistant that accelerates developer workflows and enriches their understanding of entire code bases. Its star product is the code base assistant that helps developers search across the board to identify where a code resides and who has updated it.
Key features
- It helps to quickly locate code via file name, function name, or a plain English text description.
- It generates code snippets or full functions based on given instructions.
- It identifies and helps rectify errors in the code base.
- It explains complex functions or code structures in easy language.
6. Codiga
Codiga is an AI coding tool that helps in static code analysis. It is designed to help programmers write faster, better, and safer code, as the tool uses AI to study and inspect doe for potential bugs, vulnerabilities, safety threats, and other vulnerabilities. Codiga is compatible with various development environments like JetBrains, VS Code, GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio, and GitLab.
Key features
- It offers static code analysis for early code fixes and seamless error detection.
- It automatically provides code snippets for mundane coding tasks for enhanced productivity.
- It offers automated code reviews for maximum time-saving and code quality.
- It is compatible with most of the prominent IDEs, making it highly usable for programmers within various industries.
7. CodeWP
CodeWP is a cloud-based AI coding assistant for WordPress that helps expedite coding for WordPress developers, irrespective of their skill level. This AI-powered program rapidly generates valid code for diverse tasks, including custom post type creation, plugin development, and extending core functions of WordPress products. Developers can simply describe the code they require, and CodeWP will produce secure and robust code that is also fully customizable.
Key features
- It supports a variety of coding tasks, which makes it a value-add for developers in almost any stage of the coding process.
- It offers vetted and pre-built code snippets for diverse use cases.
- It helps developers write code for WordPress and other plugins like ACF, WooCommerce, and page builders.
- It’s trained on a large dataset of WordPress code and, hence, ensures maximum accuracy and security when generating code.
8. Bugasura
An AI-driven bug-tracking tool, Bugasura helps to streamline bug management for developers. Bugasura uses insightful pattern detection and intelligent automation to manage bugs and offers insights to enhance the bug-tracking process. The tool also has integrations with numerous IDEs, which furthers its case as an essential coding tool for any development tool.
Key features
- It automatically identifies bugs in code and catches them before any threat is caused.
- It intelligently implements bug prioritization based on type and severity, auto-tagging bugs and writing a description for each of them.
- It integrates with industry-standard tracking tools like Zendesk, Asana, and Jira to synchronize bug-tracking data.
- It facilitates seamless team collaboration with features that help developers build, assign, track, and communicate about bugs in a unified platform.
9. Android Studio Bot
Android Studio Bot is another AI coding tool that is built into Android Studio and helps boost productivity for mobile app developers. The tool is built on Codey and PaLM 2 LLMs by Google, and hence, is able to quickly generate efficient code, solve errors, and answer queries about Android development.
Key features
- It’s easy to use as it analyzes input text in Android Studio and automatically responds or performs the desired action.
- It generates codes for various needs, including adding functionalities, testing mobile apps, and creating layouts.
- It answers development questions in real-time, helping developers learn about core concepts like error resolution and API usage.
- It detects and fixes code errors to ensure hassle-free app development.
- It continuously learns through developer interactions and improves to become better at code assistance.
10. AI Helper Bot
AI Helper Bot is a robust SQL query generator that uses AI to generate SQL queries through simple English language prompts. The tool seamlessly integrates with prominent databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server and only needs a JSON upload to do so. Additionally, developers can save and share their generated SQL queries for future reference.
Key features
- It requires minimal prompting experience as it provides responses based on simple questions by developers.
- It offers easy-to-understand explanations about what a specific SQL query is doing.
- It instantly generates SQL queries to help developers streamline their workflow.
11. SinCode
An all-in-one AI coding assistant, SinCode helps developers with numerous tasks, including code generation and AI writing. SinCode focuses on writing code instead of quintessential generative AI, which many alternatives prioritize. However, its ability to use prompts for writing code makes it an excellent pic for users seeking tools that can not only write content but also generate some AI code.
Key features
- It comprises an array of writing use cases and templates for specific writing tasks.
- It transcribes audio, generates images, and edits full-fledged documents.
- It automatically generates code through user prompts and finds bugs in the supplied code.
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What should you look for in an AI coding tool?
There are various AI coding tools out there, and to make the right pick, you need to prioritize specific criteria based on your requirements. Here are some key pointers to consider when choosing:
- The intelligent code auto-completion, suggestions, methods, and variable names the tool offers.
- Whether the tool supports the programming languages you regularly work with.
- The debugging assistance and error detection features the tool offers.
- The ability to customize the tool as per your coding preferences and style.
- Whether the tool has version control integrations to simplify collaboration, change tracking, and overall project management.
- Whether the tool has advanced AI capabilities, such as refactoring suggestions, code generation, or code summarization.
Conclusion
As evident here, there are various AI coding assistants and tools available, catering to multiple developer tasks and workflow enhancement. However, you must clearly define your preferences and coding goals to select the tools ideal for your coding tasks.
Moreover, if you’re new to using AI-powered tools, you can sign up for hands-on workshops on Be10X to understand and master AI tools and become a star performer at work. Learn more here.
