Programming is the backbone of modern software development, driving the creation of innovative applications and systems that power the digital world. However, the coding process can be complex and challenging. Imagine an AI assistant that can not only complete lines of code you started but also suggest different functionalities based on your project’s goals. AI-assisted coding tools have emerged as invaluable companions to revolutionize the programming landscape and enhance developers’ coding experience.
Let’s explore the top 10 best AI Coding Assistants, examining their features, benefits, and transformative impact on developers, enabling them to write better code, save time, and unleash their full coding potential.
What is an AI coding assistant?
Have you ever spent hours writing repetitive code or struggling to find the perfect function? AI coding assistants are here to help! These sophisticated software tools harness the capabilities of powerful AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), to streamline your development workflow.
They act as your virtual coding partner, offering intelligent suggestions for completing code lines, fixing errors, and even recommending alternative approaches to achieve your goals. This translates to faster development, cleaner code, and a significant boost in your overall productivity.
Let’s explore the challenges that programmers and developers face every day while also understanding how AI coding tools can help solve them.
10 best AI Coding Assistants – 2024 List
1. CodiumAI
OK, we had to put ourselves first ? but we have very good reasons!
CodiumAI is a trending tool that developers can use to enhance their coding experience with the power of AI.
Key features
When compared to the other tools, CodiumAI provides a set of unique features:
- Precise code suggestions: CodiumAI thoroughly analyzes your code, providing tailored suggestions. These include adding docstrings, refining exception handling, and implementing best practices, directly improving your code’s quality.
- Code explanation: This tool offers detailed descriptions of your source code or snippets, breaking down each component and offering insights and sample usage scenarios to enhance code comprehension.
- Automated test generation: Testing is essential in large codebases. CodiumAI simplifies this by swiftly generating accurate and reliable unit tests without manual intervention, saving significant time and effort and ensuring thorough testing of your codebase.
- Code behavior coverage: Comprehensive testing means covering all possible code behaviors. CodiumAI’s “Behavior Coverage” feature generates test cases covering various code behaviors and seamlessly applies related changes to your source code.
- Streamlined collaboration: CodiumAI facilitates teamwork by enabling seamless collaboration among developers. Its Git platform integration allows for sharing and reviewing code suggestions and test cases within your development team, promoting efficient workflows and code quality.
- Seamless implementation: With CodiumAI’s intelligent auto-completion agent, implementation becomes effortless. It seamlessly integrates with your task plans, ensuring smooth execution from concept to completion of your code.
- Multiple language and IDE support: CodiumAI supports popular programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript while seamlessly integrating with leading IDEs, including VSCode, WebStorm, IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, PyCharm, and JetBrains.
Pricing
The pricing of CodiumAI offers free code integrity for developers at $0/user per month, while teams can access optimized collaboration for $19/user per month.
2. GitHub Copilot
The generative AI model fueling GitHub Copilot was jointly developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. This innovative collaboration aims to transform the coding experience by harnessing the capabilities of AI and machine learning.
Key features
With a focus on enhancing developers’ productivity and simplifying the coding process, GitHub Copilot offers a diverse array of advanced features:
- Code suggestions: GitHub Copilot provides code suggestions, completing lines or entire functions based on comments in your file.
- Chat functionality: It features a chatbot within the developer’s environment, allowing for questions, suggestions, debugging, and natural language queries.
- Easy Auto-complete Navigation: Cycle through multiple auto-complete suggestions with ease, allowing them to explore different options and select the most suitable suggestion for their code.
- Multiple language and IDE support: The tool seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like Visual Studio, Neovim, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains, supporting various programming languages, including TypeScript, Golang, Python, and JavaScript.
However, GitHub Copilot does come with certain limitations that users should be aware of:
- Code Duplication: Since GitHub Copilot generates code based on learned patterns, it may inadvertently produce similar or identical code segments, leading to code duplication across projects.
- Inefficient Code Generation: At times, the tool may generate incorrect or inefficient code, posing challenges, particularly for less experienced developers who might struggle to identify and rectify errors.
- Limited Test Case Generation: For larger codebases, maintaining test coverage is crucial. GitHub Copilot may lack the capability to generate an adequate number of test cases, making it harder to identify and debug issues and ensuring overall code quality.
Pricing
The pricing of Copilot for Individual Plan begins at $10 per month per user, while the Copilot for Business Plan starts at $19 per month per user.
3. Tabnine
Key features
Tabnine enhances the coding experience with intelligent code completion, error detection and fixes, refactoring assistance, and automatic code documentation, aiding developers in writing efficient and high-quality code. Let’s now look at some core features of Tabnine:
- Code Refactoring Assistance: Tabnine provides guidance and suggestions for code refactoring and improving code readability, efficiency, and maintainability.
- Code Linting: It offers a code linting feature that identifies and suggests fixes for potential errors, ensuring clean and error-free code.
- Automatic Code Documentation: It automatically generates code documentation to enhance understanding and collaboration among developers.
- Intelligent Code Completions: Tabnine provides intelligent code completions based on an extensive dataset of open-source code, assisting developers with accurate and contextually relevant suggestions.
Pricing
Tabnine’s basic AI coding assistant is completely free to use, offering basic AI code completions, AI-powered chat using multiple models (may be rate limited), and support for all major IDEs. While its pro plan is offered at $12 per user per month.
4. MutableAI
MutableAI is a tool that revolutionizes the coding experience with features such as AI autocomplete, one-click production code enhancements, prompt-driven development, test generation, and extensive language and IDE integration, empowering developers to write code more efficiently and effectively.
Key features
Here are the key features of MutableAI:
- AI Autocomplete: Minimize time spent on boilerplate code and searching for solutions on Stack Overflow with specialized neural networks providing intelligent code suggestions.
- Production Quality Code: Refactor, document, and add types to your code effortlessly, ensuring high-quality code output.
- Prompt-driven Development: Interact directly with the AI by giving instructions to modify your code, enabling a more intuitive and interactive coding experience.
- Test Generation: Automatically generate unit tests using AI and metaprogramming techniques, ensuring comprehensive test coverage for your code.
- Language and IDE Integration: Supports popular languages like Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Solidity, and more, as well as integration with IDEs like JetBrains and Visual Studio (VS) Code.
Pricing
MutableAI’s basic plan offers $2 per repo per month, while its premium plan offers $15 per repo per month.
5. Amazon CodeWhisperer
Amazon CodeWhisperer enhances developers’ coding efficiency by accelerating both speed and accuracy in code composition. Powered by Amazon’s AI technology, this tool suggests code segments, completes functions, and generates documentation.
Key features
Amazon CodeWhisperer’s key features include:
- Code Suggestions: Tailored snippets, functions, and even entire classes are offered based on contextual cues within the code. This feature saves time, minimizes errors, and streamlines the coding process.
- Function Completion: Simplifies coding by suggesting subsequent lines or even completing entire function bodies.
- Documentation Generation: Automatically creates comprehensive documentation for the code, encompassing function summaries, parameter explanations, and return values.
- Security Scanning: Proactively identifies potential security vulnerabilities within the code, helping developers address issues preemptively.
- Language and IDE Integration: Compatible with a wide array of programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, C#, Rust, PHP, Kotlin, and SQL.
- IDE Integration: Seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like JetBrains and VS Code for enhanced usability and accessibility.
Pricing
Individuals can enjoy Amazon CodeWhisperer for free, with the option to upgrade to a professional plan starting from $19 per month.
6. AskCodi
AskCodi is an AI-based Coding Assistant tool that simplifies the coding process by offering intelligent guidance and assistance, helping developers find solutions to their coding queries and enhancing their productivity.
Key features
- Code generation: Generates code in various programming languages, including Python, Java, TypeScript, Rust, Ruby, Kotlin, Scala, and more.
- Answering programming questions: Answers programming questions in natural language so users can learn new programming concepts or troubleshoot problems with the code.
- Providing code suggestions: It looks at the code and provides code suggestions. This can help users to avoid errors and save time.
- Working with IDEs: Integrates with various IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, and IntelliJ IDEA. This allows you to use AskCodi directly in your IDE, making generating code easy and getting help with your programming questions.
Pricing
The membership pack of AskCodi is priced at $9.99 per month and is free for personal use.
7. Codiga
Codiga is designed to elevate the coding experience by providing intelligent support, autocomplete suggestions, and code optimizations, enabling developers to write code more efficiently and effectively.
Key features
- Static code analysis: Analyzes code for potential errors, vulnerabilities, and other issues so users can identify and fix problems before they cause issues in production.
- Code completion: Suggests code completions by looking at the context of the code. This can save time and avoid errors.
- Code linting: Lint the code to identify potential errors and style violations. This will lead to heightened code readability and maintainability.
- Code refactoring: Codiga excels at code refactoring, enhancing both performance and readability.
- Code reviews: Codiga can automate code reviews to help you identify and fix potential problems before they cause issues in production.
- Language and IDE support: Supports languages like Dart, Python, C, C#, Scala, Ruby, Go, etc., and platforms like GitHub, BitBucket, and IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains IDEs.
Pricing
An individual plan is offered for free, while a paid subscription begins at $14 per month.
8. Replit
Replit enhances the coding process with advanced in-line suggestions, mistake detection and correction, an interactive learning environment, and code explanations and comments, empowering developers to write code faster, learn effectively, and produce high-quality code.
Key features
- Advanced In-line Suggestions: Replit accelerates coding by providing advanced suggestions, helping developers write code more efficiently.
- Code Explanation and Comments: It provides explanations and comments on code snippets, aiding developers in understanding and documenting their code effectively.
- Mistake Detection and Correction: Identifies coding mistakes and offers guidance for correction, ensuring code accuracy and reducing errors.
- Interactive Learning Environment: Replit enables developers to learn how to code within the document, fostering an immersive and educational coding experience.
Pricing
Individual usage is free, and there’s an option for subscription which encompasses a Hacker plan at $7 per month and a Pro plan priced at $20 per month.
9. CodeT5
CodeT5 is an advanced tool specializing in text-to-code generation, code-to-code translation, and code summarization, empowering developers to bridge the gap between natural language instructions and executable code, facilitating language translation, and simplifying code comprehension.
Key features
- Text-to-Code Generation: CodeT5 excels in generating code snippets or functions from natural language descriptions, enabling developers to convert textual instructions into executable code.
- Code-to-Code Translation: It facilitates code translation between different programming languages, making it easier for developers to switch languages or collaborate across language barriers.
- Code Summarization: It provides concise summaries of code snippets, enhancing code understanding and making it easier for developers to comprehend and work with complex codebases.
Pricing
As a model, CodeT5 is freely available for use, encouraging developers to leverage its capabilities to enhance their coding experience.
10. OpenAI Codex
OpenAI Codex offers quick setup, AI-driven code completion, and natural language prompting, making it easier for developers to write code efficiently and effectively while interacting with the AI using plain English instructions.
Key features
- Quick Setup: OpenAI Codex provides a user-friendly and efficient setup process, allowing developers to use the tool quickly and seamlessly.
- AI Code Completion Tool: Codex offers advanced AI-powered code completion, providing accurate and contextually relevant suggestions to expedite the coding process and improve productivity.
- Natural Language Prompting: With natural language prompting, Codex enables developers to interact with the AI more intuitively, providing instructions and receiving code suggestions based on plain English descriptions.
- Supported Languages: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Go, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Swift, TypeScript, Shell, and over a dozen other languages, making it versatile for diverse programming needs.
- Training dataset: Utilizes a training dataset containing both natural language and billions of lines of source code from publicly available repositories, including those on GitHub.
- Memory capacity: Memory capacity of 14KB for Python code, allowing it to consider over three times as much contextual information compared to GPT-3 during tasks.
- General-purpose programming model: It is applicable to various programming tasks such as transpilation, code explanation, and refactoring, with potential for further exploration.
Pricing
One major advantage of Codex is its accessibility as a free API for everyone to use.
