AI coding assistants are transforming software development, streamlining workflows by automating tedious tasks and generating intelligent code suggestions. These tools not only reduce development time but also allow developers to focus on creative problem-solving, leading to faster project delivery. By incorporating AI into your coding process, you can enhance code quality and stay ahead of tech trends.

What is an AI coding assistant?

An AI coding assistant uses artificial intelligence to support developers throughout the coding process. It helps with:

• Writing and debugging code
• Assisting in code reviews
• Providing real-time suggestions, corrections, and optimizations
• Detecting bugs and security vulnerabilities to improve code quality

Like a tireless virtual pair programmer, it continuously learns and adapts to different coding styles. While beginners benefit from guidance, experienced developers can work faster while ensuring their code aligns with best practices.

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Can AI tools develop digital products?

Absolutely! AI-powered coding tools are increasingly common in modern software development. These assistants enhance various stages of the development lifecycle, from design to deployment, by automating repetitive tasks and offering smart code suggestions. While they streamline the process, human developers are still needed for creative and strategic decisions, as AI isn't yet equipped to handle the complexities of building an entire product on its own.

In short, AI coding tools are invaluable partners, allowing developers to focus on innovation while speeding up product delivery.

Why Use an AI Coding Assistant?

Software development is becoming more complex, and AI coding assistants can be game-changers. Here’s why you should consider using them:

• Faster Time-to-Market: AI speeds up coding, helping you launch products sooner.
• Cost Savings: Automation reduces the need for manual effort, cutting long-term costs.
• Accessibility: Even novice developers can create apps with AI assistance, bridging the gap to expert-level development.
• Scalability: AI learns from your codebase, adapting as projects grow in size and complexity.
• Continuous Improvement: Trained on vast data, AI suggestions get smarter and more valuable over time.
• Reduced Stress: By automating mundane tasks, AI frees up developers to focus on challenging, creative problems.
• Efficiency: Routine tasks like generating boilerplate code are automated, allowing developers to work on more complex aspects.
• Enhanced Code Quality: AI catches errors in real-time, ensuring high standards and reducing bugs.
• Learning and Growth: Developers can learn best practices from AI suggestions.
• Faster Debugging: AI accelerates debugging by quickly detecting issues and offering fixes.
• Code Refactoring: AI tools can improve code structure and readability without altering functionality.
• Personalized Assistance: AI adapts to individual coding styles, offering tailored support that improves over time.
• IDE Integration: Many AI coding assistants integrate with popular development environments, enhancing workflow.
• Image Processing: Some assistants even interpret images, offering quick, visual answers.

By embracing AI coding assistants, developers not only improve efficiency but also future-proof their skills and projects, reflecting the industry’s shift toward smarter, automated tools.

The Top 10 AI Coding Assistant Tools

For this guide, we’ve selected the best AI coding assistants: GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Replit AI, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Cody, AskCodi, Cursor, Gemini in Android Studio, SQLAI, and DeepCode AI.

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GitHub Copilot: Revolutionizing Code Completion

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GitHub Copilot, developed in collaboration with GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft, is an advanced AI-powered tool that provides intelligent coding assistance. Trained on vast open-source projects from GitHub, it understands code context and offers smart completions directly within the IDE, enhancing productivity without sacrificing quality.

Research shows developers using Copilot experience a 75% increase in job satisfaction and code up to 55% faster. Compatible with major editors like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim, it integrates seamlessly into GitHub’s ecosystem, making it a go-to tool for millions of users.

While Copilot supports most programming languages, its performance varies, offering stronger suggestions for languages like JavaScript due to their prevalence in its training data. It’s accessible through IDE extensions, GitHub CLI, and will soon be available on GitHub’s web and mobile platforms.

Key Features:

• Large user base and active community
• Integration with multiple IDEs (VS Code, IntelliJ, Neovim)
• Intelligent code completion and navigation across code snippets
• Support for multiple programming languages
• Code referencing for matching public code, currently in beta for VS Code
• Blocking suggestions that match public code snippets to avoid open-source license violations

GitHub Copilot is rapidly becoming the AI code completion tool of choice for developers and businesses worldwide.

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Tabnine: AI Coding with Privacy and Security at the Forefront

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Tabnine is a trusted AI coding assistant that prioritizes privacy and security. Trained on code from permissive open-source licenses, it mitigates privacy concerns, including copyleft issues, and is SOC-2 compliant. It also customizes its support to align with your team’s coding style and best practices, all without exposing sensitive code.

Running in a fully isolated mode, Tabnine can operate in a secured SaaS, on-premises, or in your VPC environment, ensuring your intellectual property stays protected. It only learns from your codebase if you opt in, and even then, your code never leaves your environment.

Designed for organizations that prioritize security, Tabnine allows centralized policy enforcement, ensuring standardized AI usage across teams while maintaining full control over security and privacy.

Key Features:

• High privacy and security; trained on code from permitted sources
• On-premises and VPC deployment options
• Automated code documentation
• Integrations with multiple IDEs (Neovim, IntelliJ, VS Code, Eclipse, Sublime)

Tabnine is the perfect AI assistant for teams that prioritize control over their coding processes without compromising security.

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Amazon CodeWhisperer: AI-Driven Code Generation

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Amazon CodeWhisperer is a machine learning-powered tool that provides real-time code suggestions tailored to your unique style and current work. Whether you need a simple code snippet or a full function, it predicts and completes code blocks as you write. CodeWhisperer can also generate comments and documentation, making it a versatile coding companion.

A standout feature is its seamless integration with IDEs like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains products. Additionally, it works alongside Amazon CodeGuru to run security scans, proactively identifying potential vulnerabilities in your code.

Key Features:

• Integration with Amazon’s ecosystem
• Real-time, accurate code suggestions
• Security scans for proactive issue detection

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Replit AI: Elevating the Coding Experience

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Replit AI is a suite of tools designed to enhance coding on the Replit platform, with intelligent code completions as its flagship feature. In addition to generating code, it offers detailed code explanations and modifications, streamlining the development process while providing clarity and insights.

Trained on publicly sourced code, Replit AI delivers context-aware suggestions tailored to the language and nuances of your project. While it excels in JavaScript and Python, it supports a wide range of languages, including SQL, HTML, and CSS.

Replit AI is accessible for free with a Replit account, with enhanced features like unlimited messages and a more advanced chat model available through a paid plan.

Key Features:

• Extensive free functionality
• Proactive code debugging, fixing issues without manual error analysis
• AI-powered chat directly within the IDE

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Cody: Speeding Up Development with AI

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Cody is an AI coding assistant that enhances both the speed and comprehension of software development. With deep understanding of your codebase, it offers powerful autocomplete features, completing entire lines or functions across multiple languages, configuration files, and documentation.

Cody’s conversational AI, powered by natural language processing, is especially helpful for navigating unfamiliar projects, deciphering legacy code, and tackling complex challenges. Beyond suggestions, Cody allows you to generate code, write unit tests, fix source code with one-click commands, and even identify code smells for optimization. You can also define custom commands to suit your workflow.

With seamless integrations into Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim, Cody is a versatile tool for any developer.

Key Features:

• AI-powered chat for explaining project structure and code files
• Code generation from instructions
• Natural language processing for human-friendly interaction

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AskCodi: A Versatile AI Coding Assistant

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AskCodi, powered by OpenAI GPT, is an AI-driven coding assistant offering a range of functionalities including code generation, unit testing, documentation, and language translation. It integrates seamlessly with popular IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Sublime, and JetBrains’ suite.

With Codi Chat, developers can engage in AI-guided coding dialogues, while the Translate app simplifies converting code between different programming languages. AskCodi supports a broad spectrum of major languages.

One standout feature is the WorkBook, an interactive, Jupyter-style interface that enhances the coding experience. It allows developers to generate code snippets, receive AI explanations for code segments, and even automate documentation creation. This feature is particularly valuable for beginners learning new languages.

Key Features:

• Integrations with popular IDEs
• Text-to-code and code-to-text translations via WorkBook

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Cursor: AI-Powered Pair Programming

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Cursor is a code editor designed for seamless pair programming with AI. It offers code generation, autocomplete suggestions, and a chat feature that interacts with the currently open file. Cursor can also crawl third-party library documentation to provide relevant information.

The Auto-Debug feature suggests fixes directly in the terminal window, while quick fixes address lint issues. Additionally, the Terminal feature converts English commands into executable code, and Cursor supports using images in prompts.

Key Features:

• AI-assisted pair programming
• Support for images in prompts

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Gemini: AI Assistant for Android Studio

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Gemini is an AI-powered assistant integrated into Android Studio, designed to enhance productivity by interpreting and responding to development queries in natural language. Users can ask questions in plain English and receive help with code generation, resource location, and best practices, saving time and reducing frustration.

While Gemini offers valuable AI-driven code completion and can suggest entire functions, it’s important to carefully review and test the generated code, as it may sometimes provide inaccurate or incomplete suggestions. To improve code suggestions, Gemini may send snippets and context to the AI model.

Key Features:

• Developed by Google and built into Android Studio for native Android and Flutter app development
• Requires Google Account login

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SQLAI: AI-Powered Query Generation

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SQLAI is a powerful tool for generating queries across SQL and NoSQL databases. It offers instant results and features a personal library for storing and sharing custom snippets. With effortless 1-click integrations for popular databases like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, and MongoDB, SQLAI also supports manual connections, including CSV imports.

The tool simplifies obtaining real-time data insights, allowing users to run AI-generated queries directly on their data sources and view results in tables or AI-crafted charts. SQLAI aims to make data acquisition and visualization as straightforward as possible.

Key Features:

• Generates queries for SQL and NoSQL databases (not for programming languages)
• Focuses on delivering quick results

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DeepCode AI: Advanced Security with AI Precision

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DeepCode AI, part of the Snyk SAST platform, utilizes multiple AI models trained on a comprehensive security-focused dataset and insights from top security researchers. It is designed to identify and fix security vulnerabilities while managing technical debt efficiently.

Unlike single-model systems, DeepCode AI employs a hybrid model approach, offering superior scanning precision. It trains on open-source projects and adheres to a strict policy of not using customer data, ensuring privacy and accuracy. Developers can also create custom queries using DeepCode AI’s advanced logic.

Key Features:

• Integration with the Snyk ecosystem
• Emphasis on security checks

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Programming with AI Tools: Pros and Cons

AI tools are rapidly evolving and offer significant benefits for developers. They streamline repetitive tasks, suggest code snippets, and help maintain code quality by spotting bugs and adhering to standards. This allows developers to focus on more complex and creative aspects of their work.

However, AI tools have limitations. They may struggle with complex problems, resulting in code that doesn’t always fit the project’s needs. Integrating these tools into existing workflows can be challenging, and debugging AI-generated code requires a solid understanding of the snippets provided. Additionally, ensuring compliance with regulations can be an extra hurdle for teams in regulated industries.

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Wrap-Up: Accelerate Software Development with AI Tools—Smartly

In conclusion, AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor can significantly enhance software development by boosting productivity, improving code quality, and speeding up development cycles. However, they should be seen as supplements to human expertise rather than replacements. Approach these tools with a balanced perspective to maximize their benefits while maintaining critical oversight and creativity.

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At the heart of Oursky is the art of software engineering: translating ideas into opportunities. We work with startups in bringing their ideas to life with the right blend of people, process, and technology — from MVP development to scalable digital products powered by the latest technologies. Schedule a no-commitment consultation with us and we can explore how to creatively harness the digital space to solve real-world problems.

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