GitHub Copilot Vs Tabnine

Hi, my name's Tim and here's my thought of the week.

Tabnine Review:

A while back I applied for the free student's Tabnine pro subscription (https://www.tabnine.com/students) and shortly after, my subscription was approved✅🥳. By the way, props to any vendor that has a student's tier of their products; thanks for investing in your future customers👏🏾👏🏾.

Tabnine is a great addition to my productivity suite. It's code completion is blazing fast, its suggestions are also mostly accurate and hardly if at all get in the way of me writing my code. I've installed it as an extension on Visual Studio Code and I love how fast I can get up and running and so far have never experienced any adverse effects of the extension on my machine. Tabnine will often suggest intelligent importation of modules into my files, all in all it's super smooth experience.

GitHub Copilot Review:

I also recently applied and got accepted into the Github Copilot technical preview program✅🥳(https://copilot.github.com). This time, it took them a few days to approve my application but it was absolutely worth it as the results speak for themselves.

Tabnine Vs GitHub Copilot

Straight out of the gate both of these tools are very very good. They generally serve to ease code writing but specifically offer different developer experiences in the need they address.

Tabnine feels like a much braver version of IntelliSense and on steroids. Tabnine seems to have a memory of code I've written from previous files and will suggest code blocks from different files that might be useful in the current context. That is super convenient and works just fine with my current workflow.

Copilot on the other hand it a completely different animal. It blatantly ignores that it is an inanimate piece of software and gives me function after function of code completion on barely formed lines of code. Copilot's suggestions are incredibly context aware of my code and that is very cool. Copilot can even generate entire functions from comments🤯. See for yourself:

However, I haven't noticed any of my previous code being suggested to me by copilot.

Verdict

In their current form they work to fill each other's gaps. I actually still have both running on my editor. These tools clearly aid my work and at times even do some of the work for me. However, these two tools have me thinking that soon we might actually by replaced by code writing machines.

But think of Grammarly's AI; AI that augments your writing abilities not replacing your thought process entirely.

Which brings me to my final point of the piece; these tools only improve your current programming process they don't substitute for a lack of knowledge in an area and certainly don't do the heavy lifting of complex architecture and logic for you. They're only here to ease parts of the process not demote you from your job.

Thanks for hanging out, and I'll see you next week. Cheers!