AI-Enhanced Coding

The artificial intelligence that enhances our lives, whether it’s the voice assistant on our smartphones or Cortana on our computers, is helping us to be more efficient at work and play.

Coding, however, is largely still done by humans. Or is it? AI can now generate code at a pace and in a style indistinguishable from that created by a human programmer. But what if you could also use AI to speed up your development process?

From Copilot to Replit, there is a new AI-enhanced coding in the tech industry that is extremely useful for those looking to speed up their coding and review process – it's going to be difficult to ignore the tools at our disposal as they mature.

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How AI can Enhance Your Coding Efficiency

We’ve all seen the headlines – AI is going to take our jobs, but it’s also going to make them better. The trick is learning how best to work with the AI revolution to more effectively enhance your skills and speed up your workflow.

It’s becoming more and more common to see this kind of AI-generated code that can be used as a starting point for your project. This has a lot of benefits, including:

• Speeding up coding by providing a basic structure and then letting you fill in the blanks.

• Helping you review the code by pointing out potential bugs or issues before they become problems.

• Explaining the code so that even non-technical people can understand what it does.

There are many tools out there that can help with generating code, but it's not as easy as it sounds. For example, you can't just take a random photo of an object and create a 3D model from it. You need to use machine learning algorithms to process the image and turn it into a 3D model.

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What are the Pros and Cons of AI-Enhanced Coding?

AI-generated code can be used to speed up coding, review and explain the code being created. The current trend is focused more on these commitments to efficiency and taking the mundanity out of repetitive coding tasks – or on automating some of these tasks.

One of the biggest challenges with writing code is that it takes time. There’s a lot of back and forth between what you want to accomplish, how much time you have, and how much code you have to write.

This is where AI comes in — it can speed up the process of coding by automatically generating it for you.

Right now there are two main players in this space – Replit and Copilot. They both use AI tools like natural language generation to create readable code from scratch or from existing code bases using machine learning algorithms.

Replit seems to be more focused on speeding up coding while Copilot seems to be more focused on reviewing and explaining the code generated by their platform (which also has an IDE/Editor addon).

Replit’s API generates code from a high-level description, and it has been used to generate tens of thousands of lines of code for some companies already.

Replit is built on top of TensorFlow and uses Machine Learning to understand the problem domain and generate high-quality code.

The idea behind Replit is that people don’t want to spend their time writing code, so they want AI to do that for them. By using Replit, developers can focus on the important parts – creativity and innovation, basically focusing on what they want to get done, not what needs to be done.

There’s a downside to all these breakthroughs, the primary one being on the risk level - who is accountable if there are some “hidden backdoors” or other insecurities? The time saved with AI creating the code, can be wasted in having to check that the code is legit. Other issues are related to ownership of the code, who is the creator when AI creates the code? Then they can limit your tech selection (cloud/repo, or which editor you use). 

How NerdCloud can Help You Navigate the AI-Enhanced Coding World

Understanding how best to take advantage of the rising trend in AI-enhanced coding need not be a journey you take alone. Using NerdCloud is a bit like using AI - when you define what you want, we create it for you without the problems of ownership or risk! We have designed our service to be as efficient as possible, which means AI has been on the table from the start. 

At NerdCloud, we have full familiarity with these tools and services promising AI bliss – among countless others. Get in touch today to see how we can innovate and create value together with these exciting new tools and resources.