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The Developer’s Guide to AI Tools

Nov 15, 2023 JIN

The Developer’s Guide to AI Tools

The AI dynasty has taken the technology world by storm and heavily impacted other industries’ future developments. However, when it comes to disruptive effects, both positive and negative, none have been more profoundly influenced than the software development industry.

You might be familiar with excessive AI tools that can suggest, auto-complete, debug, or enhance code, significantly expediting software development. Moreover, these tools can test applications to improve their functionality and provide invaluable insights into their performance. While these advancements are fascinating, they have also opened up a new era of vigorous competition in the field, making it challenging to determine which AI coding assistant tools are worth investing in.

How Is AI Being Used by Developers?

It’s surprising to reckon how AI has become a somewhat irreplaceable tool in many developers’ coding processes due to the distinct advantages that we have to mention:

Productivity booster: AI tools facilitate faster coding through automated code completion, minimizing the occurrence of human errors and providing additional time for more intellectually demanding tasks.

Software reliability enhancement: its capability to autonomously identify bugs and offer suggestions for resolving them, simplifying the testing process.

Analytics prediction: providing valuable insights into potential performance issues within the application, enabling code optimization to enhance overall functionality.

Complex systems simplification: By leveraging natural language processing (NLP), which enables AI to understand and generate human language, these tools assist developers in comprehending intricate code and documentation, making it easier to create innovative software.

Proactive maintenance: Developers employ AI tools to ensure system stability and reliability. Given AI’s proficiency in real-time system monitoring and analysis, it can detect potential issues before they escalate into critical problems.

What should developers look for in an AI tool?

It’s best if the AI development tool meets all the following features and attributes. Though we are not living in a perfect world, try to match it with as many criteria as possible.

  • Auto-fill capabilities: Opt for tools that propose code suggestions and automatic completion to expedite development and minimize mistakes
  • Code evaluation functions: Evaluate if the tool provides capabilities to review and examine code for quality, style, and potential problems
  • Data security measures: Guarantee the tool incorporates robust security protocols to safeguard your data and code from unauthorized access
  • Feature recommendations: In check with whether the tool can suggest features, techniques, or optimizations to enhance code efficiency and quality
  • Automated code testing and unit testing utilities: Ascertain whether the tool supports automated code testing and unit testing, which are critical for ensuring software quality
  • Seamless integration possibilities: Look for solutions that can seamlessly blend with third-party applications and programs that you commonly use during development
  • Language adaptability: Confirm that the tool can adapt to your programming languages and comprehend natural languages to facilitate better communication.

The Ultimate Roundup: Top 10 AI Tools for Developers in 2024

Here are the top 10 AI tools for you all – developers to take note of.

1. TestComplete by SmartBear

TestComplete, a powerful automated testing platform handcrafted by SmartBear Software, distinguishes itself as a standalone solution in enterprise-class development and testing tools. Recognized globally as a technology leader committed to excellence, SmartBear Software has solidified its reputation with TestComplete.

With an AI-powered object recognition engine and the flexibility of scripting or scriptless testing, TestComplete offers unparalleled ease in testing desktop, web, and mobile applications. Whether executing manual, scripted, or recorded tests, TestComplete accommodates diverse testing approaches, harnessing the power of keyword-driven or data-driven functionality. The platform has additional features for error reporting and automated playback, featuring a precise and customizable object repository. Catering to seasoned developers and novice testers, TestComplete facilitates the rapid development of high-quality automated UI tests.

Key Features of TestComplete:

  • Effortless UI Test Automation
  • Keyword-Driven Test Development
  • Data-Driven Testing Capability
  • Record and Replay Functionality

TestComplete offers flexible pricing options tailored to your testing requirements. You can choose specific mobile, desktop, or web testing options, starting at $3,655/month. For a comprehensive package, TestComplete Pro provides the entire base package at a bundled price of $5,686/month. Take advantage of the Free 14-day trial to experience the full capabilities of TestComplete before committing.

Boasting a 4.2/5 rating on G2 from over 90 reviews, TestComplete has earned high praise from its user community.

2. ClickUp

ClickUp is transforming the game for software teams by offering cutting-edge tools to boost work efficiency. Beyond the standard project management software, ClickUp caters to the unique requirements of every developer, providing a diverse range of features from automated task handling and bug-tracking templates to a user-friendly AI writing assistant.

If you follow agile project management principles, leveraging ClickUp Dashboards can give you complete project visibility and facilitate collaboration with your team through roadmaps, sprints, and backlogs.

With ClickUp Sprints, you can automate and prioritize tasks, monitor sprint progress, and comprehensively view your accomplishments using Burndown and Burnup charts. Effortlessly manage sprint organization and milestone tracking with flexible Gantt charts, allowing you to swiftly adapt to obstacles and shifting timelines by making timely adjustments.

Whenever it comes to summarizing your weekly, this writing assistant goes the extra mile by streamlining software development through various means:

Automating fundamental documentation tasks and generating tech spec docs instantly
Accelerating code review and testing through the rapid generation of test cases
Completing tasks that typically take 30 minutes within seconds, including generating updates, comment replies, and note summaries.

To efficiently manage bug and issue reports, you can leave it to the ClickUp Bug & Issue Tracking Template, which comes with three pre-designed lists optimized for enhancing your workflow:

  • Defects Master List
  • Reported Bugs
  • Limitations & Workarounds

Choosing from over 100 automation designed to simplify workflows, manage routine tasks, and streamline project transitions, ClickUp Automation is your best friend. ClickUp Integrations lets you seamlessly connect with external tools such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket, enabling you to consolidate software development within a single unified platform.

3. Tabnine

Tabnine, the AI-powered coding assistant, is an essential tool that developers can count on to optimize their efficiency, improve code quality, and cut costs.

This software offers intelligent suggestions for code completion and identifies potential errors. Its capabilities are driven by neural networks that have been trained on extensive datasets of open-source code. It supports various programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Go, and Rust.

Tabnine is flexible and quickly tailored to your specific codebase or knowledge base without exposing your code. It combines universal knowledge while resembling your coding style, delivering significant value to your team.

Outstanding features of Tabnine include:

  • Complete function suggestions
  • Single-stroke completion for entire lines of code
  • Compatibility across laptops, desktops, servers, and cloud platforms
  • Improvements in code quality and consistency
  • Emphasis on code security and privacy
  • Support for languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust
  • Integration with popular tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

However, there are some limitations to Tabnine. It takes time for Tabnine’s suggestions to adapt to your coding style, not to mention it is pretty challenging to set up.

Pricing-wise, Tabnine provides users with a variety of options. The Starter plan is free, while the Pro plan costs $12 per monthly user. It offers Enterprise plans, which businesses must request from them directly. Pricing is calculated based on your needs, businesses’ requirements, and work scopes and is structured based on the yearly billing model.

The positive reception of Tabnine is reflected in its favorable ratings and reviews from different platforms. On G2, Tabnine has secured a rating of 4.1 out of 5, based on feedback from over 30 reviews. Similarly, Capterra rated Tabnine at 4.3 out of 5, drawing from fewer than 10 reviews.

4. AlphaCode

AlphaCode by DeepMind is an AI system that can produce competitive computer programs by interpreting and translating natural language problem descriptions using language models based on transformer architecture.

This tool excels in tackling complex programming challenges requiring critical thinking, logic, algorithmic solutions, coding expertise, and natural language understanding. It undergoes rigorous training on large language models (LLMs) and integrates NLP-based enhancements to refine, proofread, and generate precise code tailored to the user’s specifications. AlphaCode remains free to use for all users.

AlphaCode has various features that position it as an exceptional developer AI tool. A few of its prominent capabilities include:

  • Auto-completion and suggestions: Using machine-learning algorithms, it provides code completions based on contextual cues, minimizing manual typing errors.
  • Error detection and correction: It conducts real-time error detection within your code and suggests appropriate fixes.
  • Code optimization: It identifies bottlenecks by analyzing code and proposes alterations to enhance performance.

Some of the most outstanding features of AlphaCode are:

  • Transformer-based language models for competitive code generation
  • Natural language comprehension
  • Error correction
  • Code completion
  • Trained on a GitHub dataset of competitive programming tasks
  • Ability to generate code in languages such as C++, Java, Python, and Haskell

5. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a high-end AI coding assistant crafted to assist developers in producing top-notch code effectively. Thanks to the OpenAI Codex language model, GitHub Copilot provides real-time code and function suggestions directly from your editor.

This tool surpasses mere code snippet suggestions, as it can compose entire lines of code, finalize functions, generate comments, and even debug and identify security concerns.

GitHub Copilot goes far beyond by offering multilingual coding assistance and community-driven solutions to ease the coding experience. Compatible with popular code editors, GitHub Copilot supports real-time collaboration and eliminates repetitive tasks.

Moreover, it customizes recommendations to meet project requirements, provides an intuitive learning environment, and enables progress tracking to enhance coding efficiency and productivity.

Some of the standout features of GitHub Copilot include:

  • Compatibility with popular IDEs
  • Providing extensions for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Neovim
  • Code suggestions and function completion during coding
  • Easy navigation through multiple auto-complete suggestions
  • Identifying errors and proposing fixes
  • Detecting code security vulnerabilities

GitHub Copilot is available for free. There are also team and enterprise pricing options, starting at $3.67/month per user for the team plan and $19.25/month per user for the enterprise plan. These prices are based on the yearly billing model.

GitHub Copilot has rated 4.5/5 on G2 based on 100+ reviews and 4.7/5 on Capterra from 100+ reviews.

6. Mintlify

Feeling exhausted from the task of documenting coding-related processes on your own? Mintlify is here to help you shake this burden off your shoulders!

This documentation software swiftly scans code and generates explanatory guides and SOPs in seconds. It’s an ideal solution for developers and development teams aiming to streamline documentation writing and enhance code clarity.

Props to natural language processing and web scraping capabilities, Mintlify creates documentation and assesses its readability. It comprehends your code context and generates suitable descriptions, even when dealing with “human-readable” method names.

Moreover, Mintlify coherently automates job management and development workflows by integrating with popular platforms like GitHub, Slack, and Dropbox.

Critical features of Mintlify include:

  • Automated documentation generation
  • Advanced AI comprehension
  • Enhanced code clarity and readability
  • Integration with popular tools
  • Installable on VS Code and IntelliJ

While Mintlify can only generate documentation for part of the file at a time and could benefit from adding more languages, user reviews on G2 and Capterra have rated Mintlify with a perfect 5/5, albeit based on less than five reviews for each platform. Pricing can only be obtained through DMs.

7. Stepsize AI

Stepsize AI is your collaborative partner in keeping track of your product engineering team’s activities and accomplishments. Acting as a project historian and task manager, it integrates with platforms like Slack, Jira, and GitHub effortlessly, aiming to reduce information overload and miscommunication, thereby enhancing overall productivity.

This tool consolidates all key activities, updates, and decisions, curating and sharing the essential points through unified summaries. By enabling quick Q&A sessions, it also saves time and minimizes the need for frequent meetings.

Leverage Stepsize AI to generate daily standup reports, offering progress updates, challenges, blockers, and requests. Automate report generation for each agile sprint, ensuring that teams, managers, and stakeholders are well-informed about sprint progress.

The tool assists in creating concise AI-generated executive summaries enhanced with insightful visuals and charts.

Key features of Stepsize AI include:

  • Automatic, AI-generated reporting
  • Timely updates and insights
  • Swift Q&A sessions
  • Advanced Encryption Standard for data security
  • Seamless integration with Jira, GitHub, Slack, Zoom, and more

Stepsize AI offers a free version and Team, Business, and Enterprise plans. All listed prices correspond to the yearly billing model. On ProductHunt, it has been rated 5/5.

8. aiXcoder

Coding becomes a seamless experience with aiXcoder, a tool that promptly translates natural language into method-level code. It offers comprehensive code completion for entire lines or groups of lines, fostering unparalleled coding efficiency.

aiXcoder incorporates a GitHub-supported open-source code search effortlessly integrated with your preferred development environment (IDE). It is simple—select your code, right-click, and choose “search similar codes with aiXcoder” to instantly find similar code snippets. You can also input keywords in the service window to explore relevant API use cases and access source code links for easy verification and reference.

Enterprises can take advantage of the following specialized features:

  • Tailored Intelligence Engine: Train a dedicated deep learning engine with private enterprise code
  • Enterprise Code Search: Establish a customized code intelligence search engine for businesses
  • Developer Efficiency Stats: Boost coding efficiency and problem identification for enterprises by focusing on initial coding details

Not only does aiXcoder flawlessly adapt to your coding environment, providing insightful code suggestions and offering prompt feedback.

aiXcoder highlights include:

  • Smart full-line and multi-line code completion
  • Coding efficiency statistics
  • Enterprise-level customization for complex challenges
  • Supports multiple IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm
  • Multilingual support with C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc.
  • Seamless IDE integration for code search

aiXcoder does offer a free version, and other pricing options are available upon contact.

9. AskCodi

Created by Assistiv.ai, AskCodi is an AI assistant with dynamic features to enhance your coding experience.

Utilize the user-friendly Translate app to convert natural language into code across 30+ programming languages, including C++, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP. Spontaneously switch between programming languages, simplifying multilingual coding.

Accelerate your coding process with code suggestions and engage in smooth AI-powered conversations that streamline collaboration among programmers.

AskCodi highly integrates with popular editors like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, and Atom. This comprehensive support helps in error prevention, skill acquisition, and increased productivity during coding.

AskCodi’s notable features include:

  • Support for IDE extensions like VS Code and PyCharm
  • Provision of code snippets in multiple languages (English, German, and Polish)
  • Easy code snippet sharing
  • Code analysis for bugs, performance, and security
  • AskCodi app for frontend and backend development

While improved online documentation and a slightly reduced learning curve could enhance the user experience, AskCodi is FREE. Premium and Ultimate plans are available at $9.99/month per user and $29.99/month per user, respectively, with all prices based on the yearly billing model.

With a 4.8/5 rating on G2 based on 70+ reviews and a 4.9/5 rating on ProductHunt from 10+ reviews, AskCodi is highly regarded among users.

10. Scribe

Scribe is a screen capture and documentation tool that leverages AI capabilities to aid developers in creating and managing process documents.

With Scribe’s AI feature, users can easily generate guides, tutorials, and SOPs. It transforms workflows into visual, user-friendly how-tos, optimizing productivity across all operations.

You can direct Scribe’s AI content creation tool to organize your documents by incorporating titles, descriptions, additional context, and redacting sensitive information. It also allows for personalized branding and screenshot editing and offers helpful tips.

Moreover, you can also capture, edit, and share the Scribes with your team and stakeholders, promoting collaboration and efficiency.

Scribe is strikingly integrated with many popular developer tools, from WordPress and Microsoft Teams to Airtable and ClickUp, ensuring smoother and more convenient workflow management.

Key features of Scribe include:

  • Customizable text, steps, and images
  • AI-powered step-by-step guides featuring annotated screenshots
  • User-friendly feedback tools
  • Robust enterprise-level security and controls
  • Accessible through a Chrome extension and desktop application

While Scribe users occasionally experience errors, it has received positive ratings overall. The tool offers a basic free plan, a Pro (Teams) plan priced at $12/month per seat (with a minimum of five seats), and an enterprise plan with custom pricing, all based on the yearly billing model.

According to user reviews, Scribe has achieved a 4.8/5 rating on G2 based on 60+ reviews and a 4.9/5 rating on Capterra.

Is the AI tool for the win yet?

Given the ongoing advancements in AI frameworks specially tailored for developers, many options are available to automate repetitive tasks and boost productivity. Consider experimenting to witness firsthand how they impact your development workflow, and drop us your thoughts on them.

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