Top AI Code Generation Tools

Software programming is a highly cognitive task requiring specific set of skills and abilities. Developing Artificial Intelligence which can generate source code can greatly help human programmers by augmenting their efforts and time. The current state of the art deep learning approaches have made it possible to train Large Language Models capable of suggesting source code in a human readable format, given basic specification requirements as input. 

A programmer transforms the user requirements, typically expressed in natural language , into a high level programming language such as Java, Python or C++. To achieve this task, a programmer utilizes certain cognitive skills as well as the knowledge of specific programming language. In order to write a software program, developer need to express what a program should do in a particular syntax of a high level programming language. For AI to do the same, it also needs to learn the programming language and also reason about the structure of the program to accomplish the purpose.

Intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals. If this ability is incorporated in a machine, it is said to have artificial intelligence. One of the complex goals done by humans is computer programming. It is a specialized task which requires some learning like a programming language such as Python, Java, C++. The computer code is written by programmers in a high level programming language based on some requirements or natural language specifications of what the program is expected to perform. It is possible to let this task with AI machines to write a computer program in the high level language of our choice such as Python, Java by telling the AI machine what to do. In fact, Natural Language based AI agents are already in practice which can generate some response in natural language based on input in same language such as Chat GPT, Apple Siri and Google Assistant.

After the program requirements are fully understood, the act of programming can be divided in 2 steps (1) breaking down a bigger problem into smaller problems, and (2) mapping those simple problems to existing code (libraries, APIs, or functions). The latter activity is where most AI code generation tools excel the most. Some of the notable LLM based code generation tools available today are listed below. These tools leverage the power of LLMs to enhance developer productivity by providing intelligent code suggestions, reducing errors, and speeding up the coding process.

	GitHub Copilot Copilot is an AI coding assistant tool based on Codex, a novel model based on OpenAI's GPT3 that has been trained on large amounts of open source code from GitHub. It offers auto-complete style suggestions to programmers in supported IDEs including Microsoft Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Azure Data Studio and Vim / Neovim. A chat interface is also available in GitHub.com and GitHub mobile. It can enhance developer's productivity by offering suggestions based on a combination of the context (source code) and the “knowledge” gained during the training process.
	OpenAI Codex Codex is an AI coding assistant tool which powers GitHub Copilot. Codex can interpret natural language commands to generate code in various programming languages. It is trained on natural language and billions of lines of code from publicly available sources. OpenAI Codex can also be integrated by developers in their apps using an API for transpiling, explaining and refactoring code.
	Google Gemini Google Gemini Code Assist can complete the code while programming, and can generate code blocks on request. Code assistance offers a natural language chat interface in many popular IDEs, such as Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, WebStorm), Cloud Workstations, Cloud Shell Editor, and supports 20+ programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, C, C++, Go, PHP, and SQL.
	CodeT5 Developed by Salesforce, CodeT5 is a transformer based model specifically designed for code generation and understanding tasks. It supports a variety of programming languages and tasks, including code completion, code generation based on natural language description and code summarization in natural language for comments / documentation.
	TabNine TabNine offers AI-powered chat and code completion to accelerate the software development life cycle and support common use cases such as planning, code generation, explaining code, creating tests, fixing code, creating documentation, and maintaining code. TabNine supports Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim and Eclipse. The entry level basic version is available free of cost.
	PyCharm JetBrains' IDEs like PyCharm and IntelliJ IDEA have integrated AI-based code completion tools that leverage machine learning models to enhance the coding experience.
	Codiga An AI-powered code assistant that provides real-time code suggestions, refactoring tips and code quality improvements. Codiga Coding Assistant works for 15 programming languages with VS Code, JetBrains and Google Chrome.
	Amazon CodeWhisperer It is a machine learning-powered code suggestion tool from AWS that assists developers in writing code faster by providing context-aware code completions and recommendations. Users can interact with CodeWhisperer from popular IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, AWS Cloud9), the command line, Jupyterlab, and various AWS services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Glue Studio, and AWS EMR Studio. CodeWhisperer offers code recommendations for multiple programming languages including: Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, PHP, Rust, Kotlin, SQL, JSON (AWS CloudFormation), YAML (AWS CloudFormation), HCL (Terraform), CDK (Typescript, Python), Ruby, C++, C, Shell, and Scala.
	AskCodi AskCodi provides various applications for code generation, unit test creation, documentation, code conversions etc. AskCodi is powered by different LLMs like GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Claude 3, and Llama 3.1. Apart for web app, AskCodi is currently available as extension / plugin for Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text and the JetBrains' IDEs.
	Sourcegraph Cody Cody is an AI coding assistant that uses advanced search and codebase context to help you understand, write, and fix code faster. Cody generates single lines, or whole functions, in multiple programming languages and can be integrated with VS Code, IntelliJ and Neovim.
	Codeium Codeium is AI code generation tool with autocomplete and chat features. It supports around 70+ programming languages and can be integrated with 40+ IDEs. It has a free version for individual users.