If you’re a programmer or aspiring to be one you are probably familiar with challenges like coding the same basic things over and over spending hours searching for errors debugging going back and forth with ChatGPT to solve doubts and even adding comments to your code to explain what it does but what if you had an assistant that can do all these things for you.
3 Best Ai Assistant for Programming
- CodeGeeX
- GitHub Copilot
- Codeium
The 3 best AI Assistant for programmers these AI Tools can complete your code as you type find and fix errors for you have a chat Bot that solves your doubts and even translate your code from one language to another language.
Also Read: Make AI App Free With No Code
How to Install Extension in Visual Studio Code
- First step is to open VS Code on our computer.
- Second step is to install the extension so let’s click on the Extension icon.
- Third step Search for any Extension now click on the extension and click install.
CodeGeeX
How to Setup CodeGeeX in Visual Studio Code
- Click on the extension icon and search for CodeGeeX now click on the extension and click install.
- Set up the extension so click login then click allow now here click on English to translate this page and sign up using your Google account.
- You’re now logged in but by default this tool is in another language so to change it to English let’s click on the settings icon go to extension settings now change the language preference in all these three from default to English and it’s done
Features of CodeGeeX
Code auto complete
The first feature is code auto complete this feature figure out what you’re going to type and gives you suggestions to final lines.
So let’s see how it works we’ll start with something simple like calculating the factorial of a number and as you start typing you will see the suggestions which start to appear here to accept the suggested code just press Tab and as you can see it has automatically completed the main function which is the part from where the code starts to run now.
Use this feature is just type a comment describing in simple words what code you want and you will see it suggest the code according to what you type. it does take a few seconds for the suggestions to appear but other than that it does a good job in identifying what we want and it automatically generates the code.
Code explanation or Documentation
The second feature which is code explanation or documentation with this feature you can select any part of your code and get the explanation for it right inside your ID it’ll generate a detailed explanation for the code and even add comments like this
to make it more readable this is especially useful for beginners or even for students who working on a complex code or learning a new concept.
Code Explanation
How you can do that select a portion of the code then right click on it go to CodeGeeX and click explain code as you can see it has generated an output explaining the code in detail and it’s completely correct.
Add Descriptive Comments
If you want to add descriptive comments that explain what the code does and how it works just like the select code and right click on it go to CodeGeeX and click Generate Comment.
Code debug
Sometimes we make mistakes like typos or missing semicolons while typing the code which can take us hours to find out to fix this issue we have a feature called Code debug.
How to use it as you can see this code has some bug so let’s select the entire code now right click and go to CodeGeeX click Ask CodeGeeX.
Now here type slash(/) and click /fixbug and in seconds it debugged our code using this feature will save programmers a lot of time and energy.
Chat Bot
The fourth feature which is Chat Bot and as the name suggests it’s a Chat Bot with which you can chat in English and ask any doubts and even give it prompts to generate any code.
How it works just click on CodeGeeX icon and here you need to enter a prompt or a question.
So let’s ask you to generate the python code for a Tic Tac to game and the code is generated in no time now if we click insert to get it here and click Run.
Code translation
You have a code in Java but you want the same code in C++ translating it manually will take a lot of time that is where the next feature comes in which is code translation this feature helps you translate code from one language to another.
So you translate a code from one one language to another go to translation here now select the code you want to translate click translate and select the language you want then click on translate
You can translate your code from one language to another in the same way you can also change data from a Json format to a CSV format or convert data between Excel and Json formats and so on.
So these were the five main features of CodeGeeX all its responses were quite accurate which makes it really useful for programmers in their everyday work also CodeGeeX is completely free.
GitHub Copilot
The second AI assistant which is GitHub Copilot this AI assistant is a result of the collaboration between GitHub and open AI which is why it works on open ai’s codex model. Which supports 11 languages and it works on all these IDs.
How to Setup GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code
- Open VS Code go to extensions and search for GitHub Copilot click the first result and install.
- Click Sign in Click allow now click authorize and then click open VS Code.
Features of GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot also has the same five features as CodeGeeX like,
- Code auto complete
- Code explanation or Documentation
- Code debug
- Chat Bot
- Code translation
You can use GitHub Copilot great features which are faster and more accurate than others now Copilot is a paid platform but if you’re a teacher or a student you can get it for free.
Codeium
You don’t want to spend money on any paid plans let me introduce you to another AI assistant that is as good as co-pilot but is absolutely free it’s called Codeium. it supports more than 70 programming languages and works on 21 different IDs.
How to Setup Codeium in Visual Studio Code
- Open VS Code go to extensions and search for Codeium click the first result and install.
- Click login.
- now sign up with your Google account and click open VS Code.
Features of Codeium
You can use it just like CodeGeeX and GitHub Copilot. Codeium also has those five features you can check out
- Code auto complete
- Code explanation or Documentation
- Code debug
- Chat Bot
- Code translation
Code auto complete: The first feature code autocomplete and it works the same just as in CodeGeeX and Copilot just start typing and as the suggestion appears press tab to accept them.
Code explanation or Documentation: The second feature which is code explanation just select the code right click on it just click explain here and it’ll generate the explanation now to get the code documentation for this function click here and then click apply now click accept.
Code debug: The second feature which is code explanation just select the code right click on it just click explain here and it’ll generate the explanation now to get the code documentation for this function click here and then click apply now click accept.
Chat Bot: let’s check out Codeium chatbot again it’s similar to the previous chatbots and works the same but it has this additional feature if you type add function you will see all the functions of your code you can s any want and ask questions regarding it this will save you a lot of time and help you in getting more accurate answers.
Code translation: The last feature code translation to translate a code from one language to another language just select the code you want to translate right click on it click this option again and here type convert to C or whichever language that you want to translate your code into finally press just enter.
It is a great free alternative for co-pilot so you can use these best Ai Assistant for Programming and make coding a stress-free and fun job.