While AI code generators still aren't perfect, they undoubtedly have been one of the most practical and early use cases of LLMs.
From the release of GitHub Copilot in 2021 to the massive adoption of ChatGPT in 2022, many developers say AI code generators have 10X'ed their software development speed & workflows.
From suggesting code, providing explanations, adding comments, and more, these AI code generators have not only made streamlined software development, but have also made learning how to code significantly more accessible.
With the rate at which AI is improving, learning how to incorporate AI coding tools into your workflow is a must if you want to stay competitive in the coming years.
In this guide, we'll look at the top AI code generators to watch, including their key use cases, benchmarks, and more. Specifically, we'll look at:
- ChatGPT
- Bard
- Claude
- GitHub Copilot
- Replit AI
- Amazon CodeWhisperer
- Codeium
- Tabnine
- Mutable
- Cursor
- AskCodi
- CodePal
- Cody
- GPT Engineer
- Smol Developer
- Open Interpreter
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is of course a general purpose chatbot, although it's still one of the most practical & skilled AI code generator available. Also, since many other AI coding tools are built on top of the GPT-4 API, let's look at a few key benchmarks.
As OpenAI highlights, on the HumanEval Python coding tasks GPT-4 was able to generate correct code 67% of the time without any examples (i.e. zero-shot).
Code Interpreter
Another key feature of ChatGPT for coding is the Code Interpreter tool, which is available directly in ChatGPT 4 and the API. As the OpenAI docs highlight:
Code Interpreter allows the Assistants API to write and run Python code in a sandboxed execution environment.
Code Interpreter allows your Assistant to run code iteratively to solve challenging code and math problems. When your Assistant writes code that fails to run, it can iterate on this code by attempting to run different code until the code execution succeeds.
While only available for Python at the moment, it's likely we'll see support for many languages in the coming months, and many AI coding tools will undoubtedly be built on top of this.
Bard
Bard is another general purpose chatbot with notable coding capabilities. In particular, Googles recent introduction of AlphaCode 2, powered by the Gemini Pro language model from DeepMind, is a state-of-the-art model designed for competitive programming.
In competitive scenarios, AlphaCode 2 managed to solve 43% of the problems on Codeforces, outperforming 85% of human programmers who participated in the same challenges. Gemini and AlphaCode 2 are now freely available for you to try in Bard.
Claude
Developed by Anthropic, Claude 2 is another general-purpose LLM with impressive coding capabilities. As their article highlights, Claude 2 scored a 71.2% up from 56.0% on the Codex HumanEval.
Claude is also used in several AI coding apps like as Sourcegraph's Cody assistant, which uses uses Claude 2's improved reasoning abilities to provide more accurate answers and codebase context.
Github Copilot
Released in October 2021, GitHub Copilot is one of the first and most widely-used AI coding assistants. The latest version of the model is powered by a custom model in collaboration with OpenAI, Microsoft Azure AI, and GitHub, and has surpassed its previous reliance of the OpenAI Codex model.
This newer model offers a 13% latency improvement over its predecessor, allowing for even faster code suggestions to developers. This updated GitHub Copilot is a a powerful tool for developers that can significantly boosting productivity, speeding up task completion, and improving overall code acceptance rates.
Replit AI
Replit AI is another useful tool for developers that's integrated directly in their IDE and is designed to improve coding productivity and automating repetitive tasks.
Key features of Replit AI include:
- Replit AI chat: A chat interface that allows direct interaction with a coding AI in the IDE, streamlining the coding process without the need for switching tabs
- Auto-complete suggestions: Replit AI offers in-line code suggestions that adapt to the context of your project, ensuring relevant and helpful responses
- Proactive debugging: It can detect issues in code and suggest fixes, reducing the time spent on searching for error messages
- Code generation: Replit AI uses plain language prompts to write and iterate on code examples, and can find and fix errors at runtime.
- Code explanations: This feature provides easy-to-understand summaries of code snippets, which is ideal for beginners and advanced programmers alike.
Amazon CodeWhisperer
Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI-powered productivity tool for the IDE and command line. It offers a suite of features to improve coding efficiency and accuracy, including:
- Explanations: Code explanations and chat with natural language, powered by Amazon Q
- Migrations: Transform your code by migrating it to your latest language version
- Suggestions: Personalized code suggestions for adding unit tests, debugging, and optimizing code
Codeium
Codeium is an AI coding that can be integrated into 40+ IDEs, offering autocomplete, intelligence search, and Codeium Chat that can answer questions, generate code, refactor code, and more. Codeium provides autocomplete and generative code for over 70 programming languages.
Codeium offers a free individual plan and team plans start at $15/month per seat.
Tabnine
Tabnine is an AI code assistant that provides code completion, writes full functions based on function declaration, and generates blocks of code based on natural language comments.
The Tabnine large language model (LLM) is open-source code with permissive licenses and StackOverflow Q&A. For enterprise users it call also integrate with your entire codebase.
Tabnine runs in an isolated mode in your preferred environment: secured SaaS, on-premise, or on your VPC. Tabnine has also launched Tabnine Chat, an AI assistant trained on a user's entire codebase and safe open-source code, while safeguarding intellectual property and privacy.
Mutable
Mutable is AI-accelerated software development tool that provides a range of features for developers, including:
- Codebase Chat and Semantic Search: Allows you to interact with your entire codebase using plain English.
- Multi-file Edit and Test Generation: It can refactor an entire directory, adding or removing major features, including unused code. It also offers AI-powered integration testing to automate the creation of tests.
- Repo Intelligence: Features like Auto Bug, Auto Wiki, and Auto Standup transform your codebase into a Wikipedia-style article, identify high-severity bugs, and keep track of team members' work
- Code Completion: The code completion feature automatically generates code suggestions as you type, optimizing syntax and ensuring code accuracy.
- Code Refactoring Tools: These tools allow efficient restructuring and optimization of existing code, enhancing maintainability and performance.
- Ready-Made Code Snippets: Mutable provides a library of ready-made code snippets for common functions to reduce repetitive coding tasks.
Cursor
Cursor is an AI-first code editor designed for pair-programming with AI.
Cursor’s features include chat with your project, ask about your codebase, browse documentation, make code changes, edit existing code, generate from scratch, spot and fix bugs, and debug errors. Cursor can scan your code for bugs and quickly help you fix problems.
Cursor is a fork of VSCode, which means that you can import all your favorite VSCode extensions, themes, and keybindings in one click. The app also offers privacy options for security-critical work.
AskCodi
AskCodi is an AI coding assistant from Assistiv.ai to improve developer workflows by enhancing efficiency and simplifying complex tasks.
Key features include:
- Code generation and autocomplete
- An AI-powered chat interface, Codi Chat
- Support for Jupyter style notebooks
- Extensions to translate between programming languages
CodePal
CodePal is an AI coding assistant designed to boost productivity across various programming tasks.
Key features of CodePal include:
- AI Code Generation
- Support for over 30 programming languages
- Integration with Development Environments
- Common uses include generating boilerplate code, database schemas, queries, and API client code.
Cody
Developed by SourceGraph, Cody is a AI coding assistant designed to enhance coding efficiency. This tool integrates into code editors like VS Code, JetBrains, and NeoVim and provides AI-assisted autocomplete, capable of completing single lines or entire functions. Cody also uses Sourcegraph's code graph and code intelligence in order to provide detailed answers and maintain the flow of human programmers.
GPT Engineer
GPT Engineer and its associated application, gptengineer.app is an open source project designed for rapid prototyping using natural language.
Key features include:
- Customizable AI Agents: Users can specify the "identity" of the AI agent by editing files in the
prepromptsfolder. This feature enables the agent to remember project-specific details and preferences, enhancing the customization of the development process. - gptengineer.app: Originating from the open-source project, gptengineer.app is a commercial project that allows for rapid prototyping, with a user feedback system for feature requests and bug reports. It allows users to specify what to build, and the AI creates a website based on those specifications, which can be edited using natural language and deployed with one click.
smol developer
smol developer is another open source AI code generator that uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to create entire codebases.
- It simplifies program synthesis by interpreting human specifications and aiding in development, debugging, and decompiling.
- It is designed to replicate & automate junior developer capabilities.
Open Interpreter
Open Interpreter is a AI coding tool that lets LLMs run code on your computer to complete tasks. This provides a natural-language interface to your computer's general-purpose capabilities:
- Create and edit photos, videos, PDFs, and other files
- Control a Chrome browser to perform research
- Plot, clean, and analyze large datasets
That's it for this list of the top AI code generator tools. We'll continue to update this as new tools are released, so be sure to bookmark it or sign up to our newsletter for updates.
