8 AI Coding Tools to Supercharge Coding Productivity in 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has disrupted every major industry, and AI coding tools now empower beginner and experienced programmers alike, rocketing their productivity and helping them get more done in less time.

AI Coding tools help with code generation, debugging, improving algorithms, code completion, and converting code from one programming language to another. Recent advancements in generative AI mean that AI coding tools can speed up software development more than ever. 

But which AI coding tool is the best, and what caveats exist when leveraging these tools for writing code? Let’s do a deep dive into what AI coding is all about and which AI coding tools are best for you.

How does AI coding work?

AI coding tools typically use a large language model (LLM) trained using a massive corpus of programming language source code. For example, OpenAI’s Codex—an AI coding tool derived from GPT-3—was trained on “tens of millions of public code repositories,” according to the Codex website. 

GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformers”—a revolutionary AI model based on the transformerarchitecture. 

Transformers receive textual input, encode that input into arrays of numbers, process the encodings in parallel to extract meaning and context, and then send the data to a decoder to output as text on a screen.

Pre-trained means that AI engineers provided the LLM with a huge initial dataset to work from.

Underneath the hood, LLMs are just massive number crunchers that leverage statistical probability formulae to predict the next word in a sentence and the overall context of a piece of text or code.

What does AI coding help with?

As a class of tools, AI assistants can help with:

• Writing code from natural language prompts.

• Code autocompletion.

• Code snippets.

• Quickly putting together boilerplate code.

• Improving existing code.

• Refactoring code.

• Identifying potential security vulnerabilities.

• Analyzing source code.

• Converting code from one programming language to another.

Software developers can also use AI for code reviews to improve their code quality. 

Are AI coding tools for beginners or pros only?

Both beginner and advanced programmers can leverage AI coding tools, although their use will likely differ. 

If you’re still learning to code, AI coding tools can help you generate quick snippets to study. 

Conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard are handy for helping beginners understand basic concepts—things like the differences between Java and JavaScript, or whether to choose Java or C++ for your next desktop software project. 

ChatGPT and Bard are also excellent for helping to debug code that isn’t working. You can paste in the error message and the code sample and ask these tools to debug the error. 

Advanced programmers can also leverage the debugging prowess of AI coding tools. For example, in the Python code sample below, we’re trying to translate a string from English to Portuguese using Google Translate. Occasionally, the script throws a timeout error: 

Timeout error when running Python script.

You can paste the error details into ChatGPT or Bard to get these AI tools to help you debug it. 

Beginners might find debugging more difficult bugs using conversational AI challenging because the AI models aren’t perfect and occasionally make errors. 

The rules for using AI tools remain the same, regardless of whether you’re generating content or code: AI tools work best when used by knowledgeable humans. Beginners can leverage AI coding tools to learn programming faster, and existing software developers can use them to enhance the development process. 

AI Coding tools—an overview

AI coding tools fall into two primary use cases:

• Conversational 

• Code completion tools Integrated into your development environment

Conversational tools are useful for isolated coding tasks, such as debugging a few lines of code or quickly finding out how to call a specific API. But these tools lack the ease of use that integrated tools provide. 

Integrated tools work inside your integrated development environment (IDE). They provide a smoother workflow than conversational AI assistants because you typically access their features directly within your IDE’s code editor. 

Each type of tool has its place, and both improve your ability to produce high-quality code faster. 

Let’s examine the eight best AI coding tools in 2023.

1. Amazon CodeWhisperer

Amazon CodeWhisperer

Amazon CodeWhisperer is free for personal use and suggests code in real-time. It integrates directly into Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code and JetBrains. The free version also lets you run 50 security scans of your codebase per month. 

“I use Amazon CodeWhisperer,” says Luciano Colos, founder of PitchGrade, an AI tool for startup founders to perfect their pitches. “Some people in our team use GitHub Copilot, but I think CodeWhisperer’s suggestions are better. It’s also great that CodeWhisperer tells you the source where it took the code from. Another advantage is that it’s completely free.”

CodeWhisperer uses machine learning to analyze your existing code and any comments in it, then suggests code based on this analysis. It supports many popular programming languages, including TypeScript, Java, C#, C++, Kotlin, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python. 

Below, you can see Amazon CodeWhisperer’s suggestion in VS Code underneath the comment we typed into the following Python file: 

Amazon CodeWhisperer AI code suggestion.

All you have to do is press the Tab key and Amazon CodeWhisperer suggests the next line of code based on the context: 

Amazon CodeWhisperer AI code suggestion based on context.

2. GitHub CoPilot

Codex powers GitHub’s CoPilot, ChatGPT’s AI cousin focused specifically on programming tasks. 

CoPilot is free if you maintain popular open-source software on GitHub or are a student. Otherwise, pricing is $10 per month or $100 if you pay for a year. It also has a free trial if you want to test it first. 

CoPilot checks if you’re OK with using public code in your project when you sign up. If you’re not working on an open-source project, it’s probably best to disallow this, or else you might run into licensing issues. 

GitHub Licensing page.

GitHub CoPilot integrates into the following IDEs and code editors: 

•  Visual Studio Code

•  Visual Studio

•  JetBrains

•  Neovim

GitHub CoPilot even suggests comment completion, as shown in the image below. The gray text represents CoPilot’s suggestion. 

GitHub CoPilot recommending comment completion.

Unfortunately, CoPilot didn’t then generate correct code for us based on the above prompt. But neither did Amazon CodeWhisperer when we tried it. 

In all fairness, we provided minimal context with only a single comment. However, the error does shine a light on a crucial aspect of using AI tools: You need to pair AI with human talent to use it to its fullest. 

AI won’t develop your project entirely independently, but you can find freelancer programming services on Fiverr to help you improve your AI-generated code.

3. IntelliCode

IntelliCode landing page.

Long-time users of Visual Studio and other Microsoft development products are familiar with IntelliSense, a code completion feature introduced in 1996 for Visual Basic developers and later for Visual C++ developers. 

Although IntelliCode might look like IntelliSense, it’s far more powerful. Massive deep-learning computation sits behind IntelliCode to provide code snippets and automatically generated code for several languages. 

If you’re using VS Code, IntelliCode provides AI coding suggestions for:

• Python

• TypeScript

• JavaScript

• Java

For Visual Studio users, IntelliCode provides support for:

• C#

• C++

• Java

• SQL

• XAML

IntelliCode is a bit of a “black box” solution—few configurable options exist, and it comes prepackaged in Visual Studio. If it works, it’s a potent tool that works seamlessly. If it doesn’t, it can be challenging to figure out why. 

If IntelliCode doesn’t show suggestions for you in VS Code, you might have other extensions that are interfering with it. If it isn’t working in the full Visual Studio IDE, then you might need to find freelance bug-fixing services on Fiverr to help you sort it out. 

4. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a versatile AI coding tool that helps you write, debug, and optimize code. ChatGPT is an excellent tool to paste some code into without having to install additional software if you need a quick code sample.

No official list exists for the programming languages that ChatGPT supports, but we haven’t found a language yet that it can’t provide robust code samples for. It can also provide samples and solutions for many popular frameworks, such as Vue and Angular. 

We asked it to write a quick Python script to show a GUI message to a user when the user clicks a button, and it gave us this: 

ChatGPT generates Python code.

Asking ChatGPT for similar cross-platform code in C++ would likely require several prompts because C++ GUI code requires different code based on the platform you’re targeting. The great thing about Python code compared to C++ is that Python code is multiplatform, so the simple code above works on Linux and Windows:

Linux GUI Message Box from Python.

Here’s how it looks running on Windows: 

Windows GUI code generated by ChatGPT. 

One drawback that ChatGPT has is its knowledge cutoff date. OpenAI trained ChatGPT on data up to September 2021. When you ask ChatGPT for code samples for newer frameworks and languages, it performs worse than more recent models such as Bard. 

For example, Microsoft released .Net MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) in May 2022, a framework for developing apps across all major platforms using a single codebase. The release is monumental because it puts Microsoft on equal footing with Google and Facebook, which each have their own cross-platform frameworks, Flutter and React Native. 

When we asked ChatGPT to generate .Net MAUI code, it did a surprisingly good job, considering its cutoff date, but the code didn’t work because it used a class that is now deprecated. 

5. Bard

Bard, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, now also supports AI coding. Unlike ChatGPT, it has features that make it fit into a programmer’s workflow much more efficiently, such as direct integration with Google Colab and Replit.

Google Colab lets you write AI code in the browser but run it on Google’s powerful servers so you can leverage high-performance GPUs (graphics processing units) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) for intensive AI development. 

Replit is an online IDE that lets you compile Python in the browser. It also offers AI-powered coding features. 

We asked Bard to create the same Python message app that ChatGPT made for us, and Bard created something slightly different. The difference in the two apps shows that ChatGPT’s nuanced understanding was better, but both apps work. 

Bard Python code generation. 

Bard’s implementation doesn’t show a message box but updates a label on the window instead.

Bard generated perfect code when we asked it to create a MAUI app.

MAUI app created by Bard.

We touched the code up slightly and used an AI image generated by one of our expert AI prompt engineers, and this is what the app looks like:

App generated by Bard.

Bard fits in better with the developer workflow than ChatGPT, which feels a little disjointed when you’re in the middle of coding. But when you sign up for Bard, you’re informed that humans might review all input, so don’t put any proprietary data in there. 

ChatGPT’s paid version offers the option of maintaining your data private.

6. Replit

Replit’s Ghostwriter tool uses AI to help you write code.

Replit is a powerful online IDE that lets you create apps in many different languages, including GUI Python apps that you can run entirely in your browser. The Replit team has now added an AI coding tool called Ghostwriter to its IDE.

What makes Replit’s Ghostwriter unique compared to all the other AI coding tools on this list is its seamless experience. You don’t need to install anything or fiddle with environment paths. You just open up the browser-based IDE, and there it is. 

Replit’s AI coding tool integrates seamlessly with the rest of the IDE.

The only drawback to this tool is its pricing: Ghostwriter offers no trial or free plan. Pricing starts at $20 monthly for the pro plan, which currently includes Ghostwriter. But once Ghostwriter is out of beta, the company hints that it will charge separately for it.

Ghostwriter offers code completion based on comments and other contexts, and a chat interface for users to post queries directly as prompts.

7. Tabnine

Tabnine AI coding tool. 

Tabnine is a professional AI coding tool that works with numerous code editors and IDEs, including VS Code, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Android Studio, PyCharm, CLion, Neovim, GoLand, AppCode, and WebStorm. Tabine also provides easy installation instructions for all these IDEs. 

It officially supports dozens of programming languages, even Objective C, CSS, HTML, Dart, and Perl. 

This tool has an excellent user experience, but the “free” version feels more like a tease because it doesn’t complete entire code lines. So, you’ll need to sign up for the pro plan to use its full functionality. Tabnine offers a 14-day free trial. 

Tabnine’s free version has limited functionality.

8. Cody

Cody AI coding tool.

Cody from Sourcegraph shines as one of the smoothest AI coding tools on our list. It integrates seamlessly with VS code to add several AI coding features to your project, including chat features.

Cody integrates deeply with VS code. 

The plug-in opens a panel on the left of VS Code and provides a text box directly in your code editor so you can chat about the code in context. This makes it an ideal coding assistant for both beginner and advanced programmers. 

Best of all, Cody has a generous free tier for individual developers. 

Honorable mentions

Google and Salesforce have created extremely powerful AI coding assistants to perform highly advanced coding tasks. We didn’t include them because they’re not generally available.

Google’s AlphaCode takes AI coding to an entirely new level. AlphaCode automates full-length code creation based on highly detailed descriptions. You can look at some advanced samples here, with comments from a world-class competitive programmer. No way currently exists to install AlphaCode and use it.

The Salesforce research team built CodeT5, a transformer-based LLM that automates code creation. Although the project’s GitHub page mentions a VS Code plug-in, we couldn’t find one. Advanced installation instructions appear on the page. You might need to find freelancer AI integration services on Fiverr to help you install this LLM on your machine and start using it.

Tips for using AI coding assistants

Each AI tool is best used with the human touch, regardless of whether that tool generates content, images, or code. 

It’s even more important for humans to oversee AI code because of potential security risks from software bugs. 

If you need help reviewing AI-generated code, you can find freelance code-reviewing services on Fiverr to check what the AI tool gave you.

Another critical point is learning to prompt the AI tool as best as possible. AI prompt engineering is a skill in itself that applies equally to AI text generation, image generation, and code generation.

“When I first tried using AI coding tools, I was frustrated because I couldn’t get the results I wanted,” says Colos of PitchGrade.“It took me some time to learn how to provide better prompts.”

If you need help generating AI prompts, you can find freelance AI prompt-engineering services on Fiverr to help you. 

Find freelance AI services on Fiverr 

Fiverr is a marketplace of expert freelancers, with many specializing in AI programming and general-purpose software development. Whether you need an AI chatbot developed or want to fine-tune your own LLM, you can search Fiverr for freelancers to help you. 

Fiverr programmers can also work with you while you use AI coding tools to learn to program or develop your company’s first app.

To get started, open an account on Fiverr today!