Free AI coding assistants comparison
Published in · 6 min read · Oct 19, 2022
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Earlier I published a post about an AI code assistant — GitHub Copilot, where I showed how it works with animated demos. Today I want to review the most popular free code assistants and choose the best one for VS Code.
Today there are three of the most popular AI assistants:
- Microsoft Visual Studio IntelliCode (Free)
- Tabnine (free & paid versions)
- GitHub Copilot (paid)
- Kite (Free)
Why did I say three? Because another company has acquired Kite software and, after that (more than 1 year), is not available through the official site. And there are no official announcements about Kite’s future.
If you really want to try Kite on your system, it’s still available by next links:
https://linux.kite.com/dls/linux/current
https://release.kite.com/dls/windows/current
https://release.kite.com/dls/mac/current
To compare these assistants, I will do from scratch a tiny Angular app with
- Firebase auth login page
- Auth guard
- Redirect to the home page
- On the home page, I will display a form for publishing notifications for my side hustle project — methodist.io.
IntelliCode is the most popular AI assistant, with 22.5+ million users. This extension provides AI-assisted development features for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and Java developers. It is created by Microsoft exclusively for VS Code. Currently, it’s an essential extension for VS Code installed by a majority.
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With this task, IntelliCode deals quickly. As a result, methods and variables from Document, Window, and DOM proposed are almost always ≈100% accurate.
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