AI Tools for Developers
AI Tools for Developers
Artificial intelligence has rapidly transitioned from a hype
item to a must-have tool for devs. Its adoption rate had seen a dramatic
increase even before LLMs hit desktop computers, with AI in companies surging
by 270% between 2015
and 2019.
Developers haven’t stayed behind. When GitHub surveyed the use
of AI in programmers in 2023, 92% of developers already
admitted to using AI at work. Their expected benefits were
clear-cut: A different survey, this time by Stack Overflow, mentioned hoped-for
advantages such as “increased productivity” (writing more code in less time)
and “improved code accuracy,” which translates as sidestepping bugs or finding
them.
With developers expecting AI to make them better at their jobs,
missing out on AI seems like a death knell. Developers need to stay ahead of
the curve, and these are the best AI tools for developers in 2024:
1.
Tabnine for code completion
What’s more, Tabnine can suggest code refactoring. It can
identify areas of your code that can be refactored to make them more efficient
or readable. It can also be integrated with popular IDEs and editors like
Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and Sublime Text.
Pricing: Tabnine has
a free plan. For the Pro plan, the pricing starts at $12 per month.
2.
Synk for code analysis and scanning security
SNYK is a cloud-based code analysis tool that can
help developers find security vulnerabilities and open-source licence
compliance issues in their code. The tool uses various techniques to analyse
code, including machine learning, static analysis, and dynamic analysis.
Developers report that Snyk is very accurate and reliable. It
has been trained on a massive dataset of code, and it is constantly being
updated with new data. This means that Snyk can identify potential problems in
code even with high confidence. It’s also very easy to use.
Even Reddit has taken
advantage of this tool.
Pricing: Snyk offers an
excellent free plan. Their team plan starts at $52 per month.
3.
PolyCoder for code generation
PolyCoder is an
AI-powered code generation tool that can help developers generate code in
diverse programming languages, including JavaScript and Python.
Because it is trained on a large dataset of code, it should be
able to produce good-quality code. It can also learn the patterns and
conventions of different programming languages and generate code for specific
tasks, such as creating machine learning models or developing web
applications.
Now, this is an excerpt from their announcement whitepaper from May 2022: “We release
a new model, PolyCoder, with 2.7B parameters based on the GPT-2 architecture,
that was trained on 249 GB of code across 12 programming languages on a single
machine.” When the paper dropped, this seemed like a failsafe approach. But, in
hindsight, seeing how Large Language Models are
inclined to hallucinate, and seeing how GPT-2 is already outdated, you should
still closely watch out for any code put out by PolyCoder. It can be an
exceptional assistant to brainstorming ideas, but better to primarily rely on
your own code.
Pricing: Free and open
source.
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4.
Otter.ai for meeting and transcription
Otter.ai is an AI-powered meeting transcription
tool that can help developers transcribe their meetings. It is available for
both desktop and mobile devices. The tool is able to identify the speakers in a
meeting and attribute their words to them in the transcript. It also includes
timestamps in its transcripts, so developers can easily find specific points in
a meeting with a Ctrl+F command.
Otter.ai is uses a combination of deep learning and natural
language processing to transcribe meetings with high accuracy, even in noisy
environments. It works very well for most meetings. Yet, speakers with
non-American English accents have consistently reported that Otter’s
transcription feature doesn’t quite accurately capture them. It might have been
trained with American accents only. So we recommend combining Otter with other
tools if your meeting is multinational.
Pricing: Otter.ai offers
a free plan and other plans with varying features. The Pro plan costs $10 per
user/month when billed annually.
5.
Rewind.ai for documentation
Rewing.ai was founded by the team behind
Scribe.ai, an AI-powered process documentation tool that was acquired by Google
in 2020. The Rewing.ai team has taken the best of Scribe.ai and built a new
AI-powered process documentation tool that is even more powerful, accurate, and
easy to use. It can help devs create clear and concise documentation for their
code and processes.
Rewing.ai is a highly customisable tool. Devs can customise the
output of Rewing.ai. For example, they can generate documentation in different
formats, such as Markdown, HTML, or PDF.
Pricing: The pricing for
Rewind.ai starts at $100 per month, per regular update.
6.
Hugging Face for natural language processing
Hugging Face is an open-source software organisation
that brings together resources dedicated to natural language processing and
LLMs. This platform simplifies NLP application development because it collects
pre-trained language models that can handle tasks like text classification,
question answering, and machine translation.
There’s a “playground” option where developers can try some
prompts through a pre-defined GUI. For example, you can always ask OpenGPT-4o (not endorsed by Scarlett Johansson
yet) to make some easy calculations based on image recognition.
Hugging Face also provides a well-organised library of datasets
specifically designed for NLP tasks, along with essential tools like
tokenizers, transformers, and training scripts.
Pricing: Hugging Face has
a free plan, but it offers a Pro plan for $9 a month for those who want to
contribute financially.