What do you recommend for coding using AI help?

Questions / Help
1

Hi Community

This is a very general question
I didn’t jump into the AI bandwagon yet, and I am not sure where to start

So which AI tool/setup do you recommend , paid or free

I am surely interested in what works best for Elixir, but also what works best in general, for coding with any other language

Thanks

2

I will just share my experience, not sure if it will be useful. I have subscription for Github Copilot for a while, before that I used free Codeium.

In my experience it is good for auto-complete, sometimes it will guess big chunks of code correct and can save you lot of typing. I also use it alot if I don’t remember how something is done in some specific language, like for example formatting decimal with exactly 2 decimal places and things like that. I also had success with writing some bash scripts which solve some basic and isolated problem, often it just works, you don’t need to know bash to do that. Sometimes you can just copy/paste some error you don’t understand and get fast solution. You can also generate good tests with AI. Also I rarely open documentation now, if I need something specific it is much faster to ask AI, than to use google/docs.

I rarely use AI to try to generate new code or make significant changes in existing code. Sometimes I try to do that, but in my experience you just replace task of writing code with task of reading someone else’s code. Sometimes code is correct, sometimes it is not. Usually code is not optimal and is overkill for problem you trying to solve. So I usually prefer to start coding myself and use auto-complete to speed up things. But this is just my experience, maybe I need to write prompts better :smiley:

I would say start with Copilot free trial. In my opinion $100 per year totally worth it and will definitely save you some time on some of tasks I described above. They recently added other models (Claude and o1), so you have access to multiple models in case one doesn’t solve your problem. Good integration with IDEs (I use VSCode). I don’t have lot of experience with alternatives so can’t say if something else works better.

Hope it helps.

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