What do you recommend for coding using AI help?

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

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.

Personally I prefer the chat interface for AI coding, although I seem to be in a minority. This could be because I’m frequently working on a 13" laptop screen, so the IDE AI integrations feel cramped to me.

Instead of explaining over and over why I prefer this, I wrote a blog post on the subject (it introduces the tool I created to help with this).

Not a heavy user for code as I’ve put Ash at the heart of my project: I can reason from the git status significantly better than any AI (for now, at least)

For specific Elixir/JS, Python I prefer Claude Sonnet code output, coupled with Aider ((GitHub - Aider-AI/aider: aider is AI pair programming in your terminal · GitHub)) which supports most LLMs. There’s also a new VSCode extension (not tried): GitHub - lee88688/aider-composer: Aider's VSCode extension, seamlessly integrated into VSCode · GitHub

Zed gives a nice, similar experience, with a (currently) free Claude tier. Not enough about the editor for me to move from VSC however and I won’t be drawn down the subscription pathway for an editor.