AI coding assistants still need to mature, but they are already helpful according to several attendees of a recent Silicon Valley event for software developers.
Software developers who attended the DeveloperWeek conference in Santa Clara, CA, on February 12 were mostly optimistic about AI coding assistants, after having tried them out. “They certainly provide an opportunity to accelerate software development,” said Jens Wessling, CTO and chief architect at software security company Veracode. Wessling has used GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, and JetBrains AI Assistant. “It’ll be interesting to see how in the long term they address issues like security and correctness, but it’s a step in an interesting direction.”
“They’re great as tools,” said Juan Salas, CTO at Alto, which provides software development services, focusing on Latin America. Having used GitHub Copilot and Cursor, Salas said these tools help save time if users know how to use them. GitHub Copilot, agreed college student Aasritha M., is a “pretty cool extension.” She said she likes how Copilot recognizes the pattern of what the developer is doing and is about to do next. The tool almost never gets this wrong, she said. However, ChatGPT does a better job of finding mistakes in code, she said. Aasritha also has used Mistral and found it to be a pretty good tool, similar to ChatGPT.
