Accelerate Software Development with Six Popular Generative AI-Powered Coding Tools
Explore six popular generative AI-powered tools, including ChatGPT, Copilot, CodeWhisperer, Tabnine, Bing, and ChatSonic
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Introduction
Modern software systems continue to grow inherently more complex over time. We have evolved from bulky monoliths to loosely coupled, event-driven, fault-tolerant, stateless, serverless, cloud-native, real-time, microservices-based, API-first, continuously deployed distributed systems, festooned with CQRS, 2PC, DDD, EDA, DOMA, Sagas, BFFs, GraphQL, gRPC, micro-frontends, contract tests, and Hexagonal architectures. Generative AI-powered coding tools do not necessarily make a developer’s job easier — they assist developers in dealing with increasing system complexity.
This post examines six popular generative AI-powered coding tools, including chat-based OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft’s all-new Bing Chat, and ChatSonic, as well as IDE-based Tabnine, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon CodeWhisperer (Preview). In this post, each tool will assist with developing an identical program to complete a series of common tasks on AWS. We will then compare and contrast each tool’s ease of use and the resulting code accuracy and quality.
“Generative AI coding tools are a new class of software development tools that leverage machine learning algorithms to assist developers in writing code. These tools use AI models trained on vast amounts of code to offer suggestions for completing code snippets, writing functions, and even entire blocks of code.” (quote generated by ChatGPT)
The generative AI space is evolving at a breakneck pace. Tools continue to rapidly improve their AI models, add new features, and adjust pricing. In just the short time it took to research and write this article:
- OpenAI announced GPT-4 on March 14, 2023
- Microsoft announced new Bing running on GPT-4 on March 14, 2023
- Google’s Bard AI launched in Early Access on March 21, 2023
- GPT-4 was added to Azure’s OpenAI Service on March 21, 2023
- Writesonic ChatSonic revised its pricing model on March 21, 2023
