Summary of programming coding support AI services

AI specializing in coding support

Github Copilot

GitHub, an online repository service, provides Copilot, an AI service that specializes in coding support. The most important feature of the service is its integration with IDEs.

The greatest feature is that by integrating with the IDE, it suggests the best source code by guessing from the contents of commented-out sentences, function names, and type definition names. In addition, it offers about 10 candidates, which you can select by yourself.

GitHub Copilot is available in two plans: GitHub Copilot for Individuals ($10/month) for individual accounts and GitHub Copilot for Business ($19/month) for organizational accounts. The individual plan has a 60-day trial period.

Github Copilot

Amazon CodeWhisperer

Amazon CodeWhisperer is the AWS version of Github Copilot, and although it is an AWS service, it can be used with a separate account called an AWS Builder ID, making it easy to use AI coding assistance.

The basic functionality is almost the same as Github Copilot, but a free version (Individual plan) is available, and the billing plan, Professional plan, costs $19 per month. The difference between the two is the maximum number of code security scans used per month and whether they are managed by IAM Identity Center.

Amazon CodeWhisperer

Generic AI

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is arguably the most widely used interactive AI, and while it is most often used for writing, such as essays, it is actually capable of programming as well.

ChatGPT differs from specialized AI in that it is not highly integrated with IDEs, etc. Basically, you can give it instructions from your browser or use third-party plug-ins to integrate it with IDEs via API code.

If you just want to have the code written for now, ChatGPT is sufficient, as it is basically free to use.

Bing chat

This is an interactive AI function of Microsoft's search service Bing, which uses the same GPT-4 language model as ChatGPT. Since it is integrated with search, you may think it is mainly for research, but in fact it also does programming.

It is free to use as long as you have a Microsoft account, but there is a limit of "20 turns per conversation, up to 200 turns per day," so if you try to have it do a lot of coding, it may reach the upper limit.

The limit is 2,000 characters, so you may want to have them write short code or refactor it.

Coding support specialized AI or general-purpose AI?

If you want to use it for serious programming, you should choose Coding Support Specialized AI.

As you will see when you actually use the Coding Support Specialized AI, it is highly integrated with the IDE, so you can program crisply using code completion as if you were programming normally.

Also, unlike general-purpose AI, you don't need to have a conversation with it, and it provides assistance by analogy from the code, so the coding speed is completely different from the way you ask general-purpose AI every time.

The only drawback is that it lacks versatility, as the languages it supports are still limited in some cases.

Users who write a large amount of code on a daily basis can easily afford to spend about $20/month for this convenient service, so if you want to use it for serious programming, the Coding Support Specialized AI is a service you should definitely use.

General-purpose AI can be specified in detail while having a conversation.

On the other hand, general-purpose AI generates answers based on conversations, so it has the advantage of being able to set detailed conditions easily.

If you continue to use conversation logs, it is also an advantage that you don't have to give troublesome instructions each time.

However, the process of conversation and code retrieval each time is not very fast, but it is sufficient for use in testing and refactoring.