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AI-Assisted Coding with Tabnine
Write code faster and be more productive
AI-assisted coding is intended to help you as a developer be more productive, write code faster, make fewer mistakes, and have to do less context switching between other windows and your IDE. But is AI-assisted coding a silver bullet, snake oil, or something in between?
In this article, we’ll look at the benefits as well as the potential downsides of using AI-assisted coding. We’ll also show a brief demo of using the AI-assisted coding solution Tabnine to help us write some code in JavaScript and React.
What is AI-Assisted Coding and How Does It Work?
AI-assisted coding is fueled by a machine learning model that is trained on other code. The best of these models are trained on billions of lines of code from respectable open-source projects around the world. Through this training, the model “learns” what characters and lines of code often come after one another. Then, as you write your code, it provides auto-suggest tab completions for you, directly in your IDE.
As an extremely simple example, if you type import React in your IDE, the autocomplete would provide something like from ‘react’; to finish your statement.
But AI-assisted coding goes much further than that; it also learns from the code you write. The model constantly examines how you write your code and what patterns you typically follow. You can also train a more sophisticated model on your team’s code repos so that it better understands how your company writes code, which helps you be more consistent as a team.
What Are the Benefits?
So, why would you opt to use an AI-powered coding assistant? Perhaps you’d rather rely on your own brain and a less fancy auto-suggest feature.
For starters, AI-assisted coding keeps you in your IDE, reducing the context switching to other windows. If the autocomplete can provide you with the right syntax, you no longer have to do a quick Google search to remember how to use an API that you’re a bit rusty on. Less context switching leads to higher productivity.
These machine learning models can also prompt you to write better code, as the…
