Julien Delange • Wednesday, August 10, 2022
AUTHOR
JD
Julien Delange, Founder and CEO
Julien is the CEO of Codiga. Before starting Codiga, Julien was a software engineer at Twitter and Amazon Web Services.
Julien has a PhD in computer science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France.
AI-based Coding Assistant are available for almost a year. The leader, GitHub Copilot has been available for almost a year now. Based on GPT-3, Github Copilot helps developers auto-complete their code based on what the model learned. These products do not let you customize the results and deterministically proposes a code snippet based on your specific inputs. Our Coding Assistant lets you not only have a user experience similar to AI-based approaches. It also lets you add your code snippets to ensure our engine will propose them.
Many software engineering teams use the same code blocks in their code base (for example, to create a react component with the correct CSS classes). Unfortunately, an ML-based approach will not always propose the right code snippets since it sources its results on another codebase. With Codiga, users add their snippets and always find what they want inside their IDE.
In this blog post, we explain this new feature for VS Code. A similar implementation is available for JetBrains and all IntelliJ IDEs.
Getting Started
First, download our VS Code extension. Then, open a file, and type a comment that describes what you are looking for. Codiga suggests code based on the keywords in your comment. You can go through the suggestions and type TAB to accept a suggestion.
Adding your snippets
Codiga lets you add your snippets to the engine and specify keywords to find them easily. To create a snippet, select some code in your IDE, right-click and click on “Create Codiga Snippet”. The snippet creation interface lets you enter your code.
Once validated, add keywords: these are used to find code in your IDE. For example, if you create a snippet for reading an XML file, add the following keywords: read, file, xml. Keywords are used to match with the words of the comment entered to find snippets.
Privacy
Codiga never reads your source code. Our API specification is open. The source code of all software running on your machine is open-source and available on Github, so you can verify we never send your code on our server.
Wrapping up
Codiga is a customizable Coding Assistant you can use with your snippets. The product is respectful of your privacy, never scans your code, and is free for developers unless you share private code snippets with your team.
You can try the product for either VS Code or IntelliJ and all JetBrains IDEs.