15 Best AI Coding Assistant Tools in 2024

Programming is the backbone of modern software development, driving the creation of innovative applications and systems that power the digital world. However, the coding process can be complex and challenging. Imagine an AI assistant that can not only complete lines of code you started but also suggest different functionalities based on your project’s goals. AI-assisted coding tools have emerged as invaluable companions to revolutionize the programming landscape and enhance developers’ coding experience.

Let’s explore the top 15 best AI Coding Assistants, examining their features, benefits, and transformative impact on developers, enabling them to write better code, save time, and unleash their full coding potential.

First, let’s discuss the definition of AI-assisted coding.

What is an AI coding assistant?

Have you ever spent hours writing repetitive code or struggling to find the perfect function? AI coding assistants are here to help! These sophisticated software tools harness the capabilities of powerful AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), to streamline your development workflow.

They act as your virtual coding partner, offering intelligent suggestions for completing code lines, fixing errors, and even recommending alternative approaches to achieve your goals. This translates to faster development, cleaner code, and a significant boost in your overall productivity.

Let’s explore the challenges that programmers and developers face every day while also understanding how AI coding tools can help solve them.

Addressing Challenges with AI Coding Tools

Here are the challenges encountered by programmers, along with how AI coding tools can help overcome them:

• Syntax and Language Complexity: Programming languages often have intricate syntax rules, posing difficulties in understanding and applying correct syntax, especially for beginners. AI coding tools provide real-time suggestions and corrections for syntax errors, aiding in identifying and rectifying common mistakes, such as missing brackets or semicolons.
• Bugs and Errors: Debugging is time-consuming and mentally demanding, requiring careful analysis of code behavior to identify and fix bugs. AI Code assistants analyze code in real-time, flagging potential errors or bugs and providing suggestions for resolution, facilitating efficient debugging and issue resolution.
• Code Efficiency and Performance: Writing efficient and optimized code requires considering algorithmic complexity and resource utilization, especially in resource-constrained environments. AI tools aid programmers in optimizing code efficiency and performance by suggesting refactorings and alternative implementations, improving code quality and resource utilization.
• Compatibility and Integration: Integrating different components or third-party APIs can introduce compatibility challenges, hindering seamless integration. AI tools suggest compatible libraries or APIs based on project requirements, ensuring smoother integration and reducing potential compatibility issues.
• Scaling and Maintainability: Managing and scaling code becomes more complex as projects grow, requiring careful design decisions to ensure maintainability. AI tools analyze existing codebases, suggesting refactorings to enhance maintainability and scalability, promoting code longevity and manageability.
• Collaboration and Version Control: Coordinating efforts and resolving conflicts can be significant challenges when working in teams, hindering productivity. AI tools integrate with version control systems, providing conflict resolution suggestions and facilitating smooth collaboration among team members, ensuring a cohesive development environment.
• Time and Deadline Constraints: Developers often work under tight deadlines, balancing speed and quality to deliver code within specified timelines. AI coding tools automate repetitive tasks, offer intelligent code suggestions, and streamline the coding process, enabling developers to meet deadlines without compromising quality.
• Keeping Up with Technological Advancements: Continuous learning and adaptation are essential as technology evolves, posing ongoing challenges for developers. AI tools act as learning companions, providing documentation references, code examples, and tutorials to help developers understand new concepts and stay updated with the latest advancements.
• Documentation and Code Readability: Writing clear and well-documented code is crucial for collaboration and future maintenance, yet can be challenging in large and complex codebases. AI tools assist in improving code documentation and readability by suggesting comments, documentation templates, and precise variable names, facilitating code comprehension and maintainability.
• Security and Vulnerability Mitigation: Addressing security concerns and vulnerabilities requires careful consideration and implementation of best practices. AI tools help programmers address security concerns by flagging potential vulnerabilities and providing guidance on secure coding practices, safeguarding software against cyber threats.

It is time to explore popular and trending AI Code Assistant tools that are available in the market for programmers and developers.

15 best AI Coding Assistants – 2024 List

1. Qodo (formerly Codium)

OK, we had to put ourselves first 😊 but we have very good reasons!

Qodo (formerly Codium) is a trending tool that developers can use to enhance their coding experience with the power of AI.

Key features

When compared to the other tools, qodo (formerly Codium) provides a set of unique features:

• Precise code suggestions: qodo (formerly Codium) thoroughly analyzes your code, providing tailored suggestions. These include adding docstrings, refining exception handling, and implementing best practices, directly improving your code’s quality.
• Code explanation: This tool offers detailed descriptions of your source code or snippets, breaking down each component and offering insights and sample usage scenarios to enhance code comprehension.
• Automated test generation: Testing is essential in large codebases. qodo (formerly Codium) simplifies this by swiftly generating accurate and reliable unit tests without manual intervention, saving significant time and effort and ensuring thorough testing of your codebase.
• Code behavior coverage: Comprehensive testing means covering all possible code behaviors. qodo’s “Behavior Coverage” feature generates test cases covering various code behaviors and seamlessly applies related changes to your source code.
• Streamlined collaboration: qodo (formerly Codium) facilitates teamwork by enabling seamless collaboration among developers. Its Git platform integration allows for sharing and reviewing code suggestions and test cases within your development team, promoting efficient workflows and code quality.
• Seamless implementation: With qodo’s (formerly Codium) intelligent auto-completion agent, implementation becomes effortless. It seamlessly integrates with your task plans, ensuring smooth execution from concept to completion of your code.
• Multiple language and IDE support: qodo (formerly Codium) supports popular programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript while seamlessly integrating with leading IDEs, including VSCode, WebStorm, IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, PyCharm, and JetBrains.

Pricing

The pricing of qodo (formerly Codium) offers free code integrity for developers at $0/user per month, while teams can access optimized collaboration for $19/user per month.

2. GitHub Copilot

The generative AI model fueling GitHub Copilot was jointly developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. This innovative collaboration aims to transform the coding experience by harnessing the capabilities of AI and machine learning.

Key features

With a focus on enhancing developers’ productivity and simplifying the coding process, GitHub Copilot offers a diverse array of advanced features:

• Code suggestions: GitHub Copilot provides code suggestions, completing lines or entire functions based on comments in your file.
• Chat functionality: It features a chatbot within the developer’s environment, allowing for questions, suggestions, debugging, and natural language queries.
• Easy Auto-complete Navigation: Cycle through multiple auto-complete suggestions with ease, allowing them to explore different options and select the most suitable suggestion for their code.
• Multiple language and IDE support: The tool seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like Visual Studio, Neovim, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains, supporting various programming languages, including TypeScript, Golang, Python, and JavaScript.

However, GitHub Copilot does come with certain limitations that users should be aware of:

• Code Duplication: Since GitHub Copilot generates code based on learned patterns, it may inadvertently produce similar or identical code segments, leading to code duplication across projects.
• Inefficient Code Generation: At times, the tool may generate incorrect or inefficient code, posing challenges, particularly for less experienced developers who might struggle to identify and rectify errors.
• Limited Test Case Generation: For larger codebases, maintaining test coverage is crucial. GitHub Copilot may lack the capability to generate an adequate number of test cases, making it harder to identify and debug issues and ensuring overall code quality.

Pricing

The pricing of Copilot for Individual Plan begins at $10 per month per user, while the Copilot for Business Plan starts at $19 per month per user.

3. Tabnine

Key features

Tabnine enhances the coding experience with intelligent code completion, error detection and fixes, refactoring assistance, and automatic code documentation, aiding developers in writing efficient and high-quality code. Let’s now look at some core features of Tabnine:

• Code Refactoring Assistance: Tabnine provides guidance and suggestions for code refactoring and improving code readability, efficiency, and maintainability.
• Code Linting: It offers a code linting feature that identifies and suggests fixes for potential errors, ensuring clean and error-free code.
• Automatic Code Documentation: It automatically generates code documentation to enhance understanding and collaboration among developers.
• Intelligent Code Completions: Tabnine provides intelligent code completions based on an extensive dataset of open-source code, assisting developers with accurate and contextually relevant suggestions.

Pricing

Tabnine’s basic AI coding assistant is completely free to use, offering basic AI code completions, AI-powered chat using multiple models (may be rate limited), and support for all major IDEs. While its pro plan is offered at $12 per user per month.

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4. MutableAI

MutableAI is a tool that revolutionizes the coding experience with features such as AI autocomplete, one-click production code enhancements, prompt-driven development, test generation, and extensive language and IDE integration, empowering developers to write code more efficiently and effectively.

Key features

Here are the key features of MutableAI:

• AI Autocomplete: Minimize time spent on boilerplate code and searching for solutions on Stack Overflow with specialized neural networks providing intelligent code suggestions.
• Production Quality Code: Refactor, document, and add types to your code effortlessly, ensuring high-quality code output.
• Prompt-driven Development: Interact directly with the AI by giving instructions to modify your code, enabling a more intuitive and interactive coding experience.
• Test Generation: Automatically generate unit tests using AI and metaprogramming techniques, ensuring comprehensive test coverage for your code.
• Language and IDE Integration: Supports popular languages like Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Solidity, and more, as well as integration with IDEs like JetBrains and Visual Studio (VS) Code.

Pricing

MutableAI’s basic plan offers $2 per repo per month, while its premium plan offers $15 per repo per month.

5. Amazon CodeWhisperer

Amazon CodeWhisperer enhances developers’ coding efficiency by accelerating both speed and accuracy in code composition. Powered by Amazon’s AI technology, this tool suggests code segments, completes functions, and generates documentation.

Key features

Amazon CodeWhisperer’s key features include:

• Code Suggestions: Tailored snippets, functions, and even entire classes are offered based on contextual cues within the code. This feature saves time, minimizes errors, and streamlines the coding process.
• Function Completion: Simplifies coding by suggesting subsequent lines or even completing entire function bodies.
• Documentation Generation: Automatically creates comprehensive documentation for the code, encompassing function summaries, parameter explanations, and return values.
• Security Scanning: Proactively identifies potential security vulnerabilities within the code, helping developers address issues preemptively.
• Language and IDE Integration: Compatible with a wide array of programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, C#, Rust, PHP, Kotlin, and SQL.
• IDE Integration: Seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like JetBrains and VS Code for enhanced usability and accessibility.

Pricing

Individuals can enjoy Amazon CodeWhisperer for free, with the option to upgrade to a professional plan starting from $19 per month.

6. AskCodi

AskCodi is an AI-based Coding Assistant tool that simplifies the coding process by offering intelligent guidance and assistance, helping developers find solutions to their coding queries and enhancing their productivity.

Key features

• Code generation: Generates code in various programming languages, including Python, Java, TypeScript, Rust, Ruby, Kotlin, Scala, and more.
• Answering programming questions: Answers programming questions in natural language so users can learn new programming concepts or troubleshoot problems with the code.
• Providing code suggestions: It looks at the code and provides code suggestions. This can help users to avoid errors and save time.
• Working with IDEs: Integrates with various IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, and IntelliJ IDEA. This allows you to use AskCodi directly in your IDE, making generating code easy and getting help with your programming questions.

Pricing

The membership pack of AskCodi is priced at $9.99 per month and is free for personal use.

7. Codiga

Codiga is designed to elevate the coding experience by providing intelligent support, autocomplete suggestions, and code optimizations, enabling developers to write code more efficiently and effectively.

Key features

• Static code analysis: Analyzes code for potential errors, vulnerabilities, and other issues so users can identify and fix problems before they cause issues in production.
• Code completion: Suggests code completions by looking at the context of the code. This can save time and avoid errors.
• Code linting: Lint the code to identify potential errors and style violations. This will lead to heightened code readability and maintainability.
• Code refactoring: Codiga excels at code refactoring, enhancing both performance and readability.
• Code reviews: Codiga can automate code reviews to help you identify and fix potential problems before they cause issues in production.
• Language and IDE support: Supports languages like Dart, Python, C, C#, Scala, Ruby, Go, etc., and platforms like GitHub, BitBucket, and IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains IDEs.

Pricing

An individual plan is offered for free, while a paid subscription begins at $14 per month.

8. Replit

Replit enhances the coding process with advanced in-line suggestions, mistake detection and correction, an interactive learning environment, and code explanations and comments, empowering developers to write code faster, learn effectively, and produce high-quality code.

Key features

• Advanced In-line Suggestions: Replit accelerates coding by providing advanced suggestions, helping developers write code more efficiently.
• Code Explanation and Comments: It provides explanations and comments on code snippets, aiding developers in understanding and documenting their code effectively.
• Mistake Detection and Correction: Identifies coding mistakes and offers guidance for correction, ensuring code accuracy and reducing errors.
• Interactive Learning Environment: Replit enables developers to learn how to code within the document, fostering an immersive and educational coding experience.

Pricing

Individual usage is free, and there’s an option for subscription which encompasses a Hacker plan at $7 per month and a Pro plan priced at $20 per month.

9. CodeT5

CodeT5 is an advanced tool specializing in text-to-code generation, code-to-code translation, and code summarization, empowering developers to bridge the gap between natural language instructions and executable code, facilitating language translation, and simplifying code comprehension.

Key features

• Text-to-Code Generation: CodeT5 excels in generating code snippets or functions from natural language descriptions, enabling developers to convert textual instructions into executable code.
• Code-to-Code Translation: It facilitates code translation between different programming languages, making it easier for developers to switch languages or collaborate across language barriers.
• Code Summarization: It provides concise summaries of code snippets, enhancing code understanding and making it easier for developers to comprehend and work with complex codebases.

Pricing

As a model, CodeT5 is freely available for use, encouraging developers to leverage its capabilities to enhance their coding experience.

10. OpenAI Codex

OpenAI Codex offers quick setup, AI-driven code completion, and natural language prompting, making it easier for developers to write code efficiently and effectively while interacting with the AI using plain English instructions.

Key features

• Quick Setup: OpenAI Codex provides a user-friendly and efficient setup process, allowing developers to use the tool quickly and seamlessly.
• AI Code Completion Tool: Codex offers advanced AI-powered code completion, providing accurate and contextually relevant suggestions to expedite the coding process and improve productivity.
• Natural Language Prompting: With natural language prompting, Codex enables developers to interact with the AI more intuitively, providing instructions and receiving code suggestions based on plain English descriptions.
• Supported Languages: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Go, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Swift, TypeScript, Shell, and over a dozen other languages, making it versatile for diverse programming needs.

• Training dataset: Utilizes a training dataset containing both natural language and billions of lines of source code from publicly available repositories, including those on GitHub.
• Memory capacity: Memory capacity of 14KB for Python code, allowing it to consider over three times as much contextual information compared to GPT-3 during tasks.
• General-purpose programming model: It is applicable to various programming tasks such as transpilation, code explanation, and refactoring, with potential for further exploration.

Pricing

One major advantage of Codex is its accessibility as a free API for everyone to use.

11. Sourcegraph Cody

Sourcegraph Cody is an AI-powered coding assistant embedded within Sourcegraph that helps developers easily navigate and understand large codebases, providing context-aware suggestions, explanations, and code completions. Unlike other coding assistants, Cody leverages Sourcegraph’s powerful search capabilities to offer insights based on your repositories’ actual code, documentation, and comments.

Key features

• Faster code generation: Cody can generate code on demand, either small code snippets or complete functions in any programming language.
• Code insights: The tool can explain individual code segments or entire repositories, where developers can easily understand new or complex projects.
• Quick unit test generation: It can generate unit tests in seconds, which helps developers save time and focus more on writing new features.
• Code smell detection and optimization: Cody can identify potential issues or bad practices in the code, helping users refactor and optimize their code for better performance.
• Custom prompts: Developers can define their custom prompts so the tool can adapt to specific workflows and coding styles.
• AI-powered autocompletions: The tool offers autocompletions that can generate single-line codes for entire functions, enabling faster coding and reduced syntax errors.
• Contextual awareness: With its AI capabilities, Cody offers context-aware suggestions, explanations, and edits, which provides developers with more accurate autocompletion and better guidance.
• Support for multiple LLMs: Cody is compatible with multiple large language models (LLMs), such as Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and Mixtral-8x7B. Users can also bring their LLMs through Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI services.

Pricing

Sourcegraph Cody offers a free version for individual developers, Pro plan for small teams priced at $9 per month and Enterprise plan for organizations at $19 per user/month.

12. DeepCode AI

DeepCode AI by Snyk is a popular AI-powered coding assistant designed to improve software security and developer productivity. Unlike many AI coding tools that rely solely on a single machine learning model, DeepCode AI uses a hybrid approach that combines symbolic AI, generative AI, and machine learning models, all trained on a vast amount of security-specific data curated by top security researchers.

Key features

• Hybrid AI: DeepCode AI uses symbolic and generative AI models trained on security-specific data, minimizing hallucinations and ensuring high accuracy.
• AI-Powered quick fixes: The tool provides in-line quick fixes and automatically scans them to ensure they don’t introduce new issues. These fixes include a higher accuracy with an average success rate of 80%.
• Customized rule creation: Users can write their queries using DeepCode AI logic with autocomplete functionality, making it easier to create, test, run, and save custom rules.
• CodeReduce technology: Reduces the processing time and amount of code that the LLM (Large Language Model) needs to handle and also improves the quality of generated fixes, reducing hallucinations and enhancing overall accuracy.

Pricing

Since DeepCode AI is now integrated into Snyk’s security platform, accessing DeepCode AI’s features can fall into Snyk’s free or paid subscriptions (Teams plan for $25 per month or Enterprise plan at a customized pricing) depending on the developer’s specific needs.

13. Figstack

Figstack is an innovative AI tool that provides developers with various features to improve code understanding, translation, documentation, and optimization. Figstack caters to developers at all levels, from beginners looking to understand complex code to experienced professionals aiming to automate tedious tasks like writing documentation or measuring code efficiency.

Key features

• Code explanation in natural language: This feature helps users easily understand the code written in any language by translating it into clear, natural language descriptions.
• Cross-Language code translation: Developers can easily convert code from one programming language to another. This simplifies the process of porting applications across different technology stacks.
• Automated function documentation: Figstack automatically generates detailed docstrings that describe the function’s purpose, parameters, and return values, ensuring that your code is always readable, maintainable, and well-documented.
• Time complexity analysis: The tool helps developers assess the efficiency of their code in Big O notation, pinpoint bottlenecks, and optimize their code for better performance by identifying the time complexity of a program.

Pricing

Figstack is free to use and includes most of the essential features.

14. Intellicode

Microsoft IntelliCode is an AI-powered tool integrated into Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that enhances the software development experience by providing intelligent code suggestions, completions, and recommendations. Powered by machine learning models trained on thousands of open-source projects from GitHub, IntelliCode understands the context and style of your code to deliver highly relevant and accurate suggestions.

Key features

• Autocompletion: IntelliCode offers whole-line autocompletion by analyzing the code context, significantly speeding up the coding process.
• Improved privacy: IntelliCode runs locally on the developer’s machine, ensuring the privacy of the code while offering precise and context-aware suggestions.
• Contextual IntelliSense: IntelliCode places the most relevant suggestions in the developer’s code based on analyzing thousands of open-source projects on GitHub. 
• Repeated edits detection: The tool detects repetitive edits, where developers can apply changes consistently across their codebase.
• Quick actions: IntelliCode can recognize common coding patterns and tasks and suggest quick actions to simplify them, such as automatically generating constructors, adding parameters to constructors, etc.

Pricing

Intellicode is freely available for use in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

15. CodeGeeX

CodeGeeX is an AI-powered code generation tool designed to assist developers in writing, completing, and optimizing code more efficiently. It leverages deep learning models trained on a wide variety of programming languages and codebases, where it can provide context-aware code suggestions, complete code snippets, and even generate entire functions or modules.

Key features

• Code generation and completion: CodeGeeX offers accurate code generation capabilities based on natural language descriptions. Also, it can complete the current line or multiple lines ahead, making the development process faster.
• Code translation: Developers can effortlessly convert their code from one programming language to another.
• Automated comment generation: The tool saves time by automatically generating line-level comments, which helps improve code readability and maintainability.
• AI chatbot: The AI chatbot in CodeGeeX provides quick answers to technical questions directly within the development environment instead of having developers find solutions on the internet.
• Wide IDE and language support: CodeGeeX supports various popular IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs and multiple programming languages, such as Python, C++, JavaScript, and Go.

Pricing

CodeGeeX offers their plugin completely free for individual users. If there are more advanced requirements, they provide an enterprise plan.

Summary

These AI coding assistants boost productivity with features like code suggestions, explanations, test generation, and collaboration tools. They support various languages and IDEs, with pricing ranging from free to subscription-based options for individuals and teams. Let’s summarize the list of 10 discussed tools in a concise table.

Conclusion

As technology advances, AI Coding Assistants are poised to play an increasingly vital role in the software development industry. With continuous learning and improvements, these tools have the potential to reshape the coding experience, fostering innovation, collaboration, and code excellence. By embracing AI-based Coding Assistants’ power, developers and programmers can overcome coding challenges, enhance their skills, and create high-quality software solutions for a rapidly evolving digital landscape.