This year has been unofficially declared the year of AI — ChatGPT stirred up a wave of interest too big to ignore. Hardly any sphere of human activity was left without AI solutions, and code written by developers is among them.
You can find plenty of “top AI assistants” lists online, but I’ve gathered the ones I’ve tried myself and described my subjective impressions of each. I also prioritized solutions with a free tier that work in today’s two most popular IDEs — VS Code and the products from JetBrains:
Tabnine
A minimalist and excellent coding assistant. It genuinely helps you write code faster, because it generates new code based on what you’ve already written. Of everything listed here, it feels like the fastest. The paid version adds smarter auto-generation and the ability to write code “from text” (generating code from a human-readable description).
The project is young and ambitious, but its feature set is still on the lean side.
Codeium
Functionally very close to Tabnine, and a viable alternative to it. The team claims its auto-generation is smarter than Tabnine’s, but that remains unconfirmed.
Sourcegraph Cody
A more advanced take on Tabnine/Codeium. The standout feature is the Cody AI chat, which can generate code, write automated tests, point out and find problems in your code, and add code comments.
Code auto-generation feels slower, but the chat makes up for it.
Codium
A feature-packed assistant. In the free version, it can auto-generate code, write tests, find bugs and refactor code, and generate commit messages based on what you’re about to commit. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in AI chat.
For a free version, that’s a lot — especially useful for beginners or anyone learning a new language.
Assistants with paid-only versions
GitHub Copilot (paid version only)
The pioneer among AI assistants for developers. Overall, Copilot doesn’t offer any significant advantages over the rest, so you might as well use it just for the brand. These days it’s easier to try the free versions of the assistants above than to buy this pig in a poke.
Amazon CodeWhisperer
An assistant from Amazon. It’s rather cumbersome, with an inconvenient setup: you need an AWS account, a dedicated access key, and a connection to the official IDE extension. Functionally it doesn’t differ much from the assistants above; its main distinction is a code scanner for vulnerabilities.
JetBrains AI Assistant
Not long ago, all JetBrains IDEs started shipping with a built-in AI assistant. Functionality-wise it’s still fairly weak, since it’s essentially just a regular AI chat. It can’t generate code — it only helps with auto-completion and variable names. Perhaps the feature set will grow over time.
Conclusions
For a long time, I couldn’t answer one question for myself: “Do I even need an AI assistant?” But after trying a few, I realized I genuinely write code faster. Every so often, instead of Googling, I ask an AI chat and get an answer faster and more accurately than I would from browsing articles.
Right now I use Sourcegraph Cody, but since these assistants change and evolve so quickly, I could easily switch to another one. Find the one that suits you — but it’s definitely worth trying.