Tabnine AI Assistant Adds Visual Studio Support -- Visual Studio Magazine

Tabnine AI Assistant Adds Visual Studio Support

By David Ramel
11/04/2021

Tabnine has added Visual Studio support to its AI assistant, which puts artificial intelligence to work for code completion within Microsoft's flagship IDE.

The AI code completion world is getting more active with the recent introduction of new advanced systems such as GitHup Copilot, described as an "AI pair programmer."

As an AI pair programmer, GitHub Copilot provides code-completion functionality and suggestions similar to Visual Studio's IntelliSense/IntelliCode, though it goes beyond those Microsoft offerings with Codex, the new AI system developed by Microsoft partner OpenAI. IntelliCode is powered by a large scale transformer model specialized for code usage (GPT-C). OpenAI Codex, on the other hand, has been described as an improved descendent of GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that can translate natural language into code.

While Codex might be viewed as the "secret sauce" behind GitHub Copilot, the Tabnine offering is based on a Team Learning algorithm, with an FAQ saying "by learning your coding practices and patterns as you code, Tabnine improves the universal, open-source completions model to be familiar with your way of coding -- and as a result -- offer you much more relevant code completions."

Tabnine alluded to the increased AI code assistant activity in announcing the new Visual Studio Support recently.

"With more major players entering the AI-assisted code completion space this year, and the increasing demand from developers for team-friendly tools, we thought it was the perfect time to add Visual Studio to Tabnine's growing list of supported development environments," the company said.

The Tabnine product works with more than 30 programming languages and now supports more than 21 IDEs, having recently added support for Eclipse, Rider, JupyterLab, AppCode and DataGrip. The company said the new Visual Studio support will open up the tool to a massive new audience, pointing to the Top IDE Index, which lists Visual Studio as No. 1.

"We've received requests from tons of users to add support for VS," the company's outreach coordinator told Visual Studio Magazine in an e-mail.

More information is available here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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