Artificial intelligence has rapidly transitioned from a hype item to a must-have tool for devs. Its adoption rate had seen a dramatic increase even before LLMs hit desktop computers, with AI in companies surging by 270% between 2015 and 2019.

Developers haven’t stayed behind. When GitHub surveyed the use of AI in programmers in 2023, 92% of developers already admitted to using AI at work. Their expected benefits were clear-cut: A different survey, this time by Stack Overflow, mentioned hoped-for advantages such as “increased productivity” (writing more code in less time) and “improved code accuracy,” which translates as sidestepping bugs or finding them.

With developers expecting AI to make them better at their jobs, missing out on AI seems like a death knell. Developers need to stay ahead of the curve, and these are the best AI tools for developers in 2024:

1. Tabnine for code completion

‍Tabnine is an AI tool for developers that provides code completion and code prediction. It is available in various programming languages, including JavaScript and Python. It uses a machine learning algorithm to learn from your code and predict the next line of code you will likely write. The tool can also suggest code snippets, complete functions, and even generate entire classes.

What’s more, Tabnine can suggest code refactoring. It can identify areas of your code that can be refactored to make them more efficient or readable. It can also be integrated with popular IDEs and editors like Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and Sublime Text.

Pricing: Tabnine has a free plan. For the Pro plan, the pricing starts at $12 per month.‍

2. Synk for code analysis and scanning security

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SNYK is a cloud-based code analysis tool that can help developers find security vulnerabilities and open-source licence compliance issues in their code. The tool uses various techniques to analyse code, including machine learning, static analysis, and dynamic analysis.

Developers report that Snyk is very accurate and reliable. It has been trained on a massive dataset of code, and it is constantly being updated with new data. This means that Snyk can identify potential problems in code even with high confidence. It’s also very easy to use.

Even Reddit has taken advantage of this tool.

Pricing: Snyk offers an excellent free plan. Their team plan starts at $52 per month.

3. PolyCoder for code generation

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PolyCoder is an AI-powered code generation tool that can help developers generate code in diverse programming languages, including JavaScript and Python.

Because it is trained on a large dataset of code, it should be able to produce good-quality code. It can also learn the patterns and conventions of different programming languages and generate code for specific tasks, such as creating machine learning models or developing web applications. 

Now, this is an excerpt from their announcement whitepaper from May 2022: “We release a new model, PolyCoder, with 2.7B parameters based on the GPT-2 architecture, that was trained on 249 GB of code across 12 programming languages on a single machine.” When the paper dropped, this seemed like a failsafe approach. But, in hindsight, seeing how Large Language Models are inclined to hallucinate, and seeing how GPT-2 is already outdated, you should still closely watch out for any code put out by PolyCoder. It can be an exceptional assistant to brainstorming ideas, but better to primarily rely on your own code.

Pricing: Free and open source.

4. Otter.ai for meeting and transcription

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Otter.ai is an AI-powered meeting transcription tool that can help developers transcribe their meetings. It is available for both desktop and mobile devices. The tool is able to identify the speakers in a meeting and attribute their words to them in the transcript. It also includes timestamps in its transcripts, so developers can easily find specific points in a meeting with a Ctrl+F command.

Otter.ai is uses a combination of deep learning and natural language processing to transcribe meetings with high accuracy, even in noisy environments. It works very well for most meetings. Yet, speakers with non-American English accents have consistently reported that Otter’s transcription feature doesn’t quite accurately capture them. It might have been trained with American accents only. So we recommend combining Otter with other tools if your meeting is multinational.

Pricing: Otter.ai offers a free plan and other plans with varying features. The Pro plan costs $10 per user/month when billed annually.

5. Rewind.ai for documentation

Rewing.ai was founded by the team behind Scribe.ai, an AI-powered process documentation tool that was acquired by Google in 2020. The Rewing.ai team has taken the best of Scribe.ai and built a new AI-powered process documentation tool that is even more powerful, accurate, and easy to use. It can help devs create clear and concise documentation for their code and processes.

Rewing.ai is a highly customisable tool. Devs can customise the output of Rewing.ai. For example, they can generate documentation in different formats, such as Markdown, HTML, or PDF.

Pricing: The pricing for Rewind.ai starts at $100 per month, per regular update.

6. Hugging Face for natural language processing

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Hugging Face is an open-source software organisation that brings together resources dedicated to natural language processing and LLMs. This platform simplifies NLP application development because it collects pre-trained language models that can handle tasks like text classification, question answering, and machine translation.

There’s a “playground” option where developers can try some prompts through a pre-defined GUI. For example, you can always ask OpenGPT-4o (not endorsed by Scarlett Johansson yet) to make some easy calculations based on image recognition.

Hugging Face also provides a well-organised library of datasets specifically designed for NLP tasks, along with essential tools like tokenizers, transformers, and training scripts.

Pricing: Hugging Face has a free plan, but it offers a Pro plan for $9 a month for those who want to contribute financially.

7. Figstack for code understanding

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Figstack is an AI-powered code-reading tool that can help developers understand code written in any language. It uses various techniques, including machine learning and natural language processing, to understand code and generate accurate and easy-to-understand explanations. It can be used to explain code that is being written, code that is being reviewed, and code that is being debugged.

The tool can also analyse code for potential errors, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues and create documentation for code, including documentation for specific functions, classes, and modules.

Pricing: Figstack has a free plan with 30 credits per month; subsequently, the starter plan comes at $9 a month.

8. Codepeer.ai for website generation

Codepeer.ai is an AI-powered website generation tool that can help developers to create websites quickly and easily, without having to write any code. It uses plenty of techniques found on other AIs, including machine learning and natural language processing, to generate websites that are responsive, accessible, and SEO-friendly.

The tool is also able to create websites that are accessible to people with disabilities. This means that the websites can be used by people with visual, hearing, and other disabilities.

Pricing: Codeeper.ai has a very short-living free plan; it starts at $10 monthly if you really want to build a website.

9. Stepsize AI for code debugging

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‍‍Stepsize AI is an AI-powered tool that can help devs debug code more quickly and easily. The tool can be used for various tasks, including debugging new code, existing code, debugging code reviews and production code.

Stepsize AI is not only very accurate at identifying and fixing bugs in code, but also very speedy. It can debug code in seconds or minutes, even for complex codebases.

Pricing: Stepsize AI begins at $100 per month per regular update.

10. Mutable.ai to generate high-quality code

Mutable.ai is an AI-powered code generation tool that can help developers generate high-quality code quickly and easily. It can create code from simple text descriptions. It also allows developers to collaborate on code generation projects.

What’s more, Mutable.ai generates maintainable code. This is because the tool uses various techniques to make the code it generates easy to read and understand.

Pricing: Mutable.ai offers a free plan and other plans with varying features. The Basic plan costs $10 per month per seat.

11. Cursor for code edition

Cursor is an AI-powered editor built on top of the Visual Studio Code platform. It integrates functionalities of GPT-4 to beef up the code-writing experience (you do have to use your own OpenAI API key). Since it “knows” your code, you can ask it about specific parts of it. 

For example, GPT-4's ability to understand and generate text translates to real-time search with “natural language” (the way we write) and extends to code completion and suggestions. The tool can also give developers access to relevant help documentation and explanations directly from the editor. Despite this, some Reddit users have reported issues when using GPT-4 within Cursor, suggesting potential performance or integration problems that the vendor should check against OpenAI’s API. The engineering team already confirmed Cursor is working with GPT-4o. 

Pricing: The Free plan lets you try out the editor with basic features and GPT-3.5. Upgrading to Pro ($20/month) unlocks access to GPT-4, unlimited uses of most features, and some daily Claude Opus functionality. Businesses can access additional management features with the Business plan ($40/user/month).

12. Codium AI for test-writing assistance

Codium AI stands out as an AI tool specifically designed to integrate with VS Code and improve the software testing process.

As you code, Codium analyses your code, comments, and docstrings to recommend relevant test ideas. This real-time assistance helps prevent errors and bugs by prompting you to consider potential edge cases. It also goes beyond basic suggestions by offering hints into how code changes might impact the whole system.

Unlike some AI coding assistants, Codium feels particularly intuitive while using VS Code, probably because it was developed specifically for this platform.

Pricing: The free tier offers test suggestions, but for a paid subscription ($19/month), Codium can actually write the tests for you.

13. Grit.io for code migration

Grit.io is a tool that automates technical debt management, specifically focusing on tasks like code migrations and dependency upgrades. It uses machine learning to analyse code and suggest improvements, conceivably completing migrations that would take months in just a few days. One of their clients completed a migration they had expected to do in 6 months in only a few days.

Grit automates technical debt management, simplifying code migrations and dependency upgrades. It can also automatically generate pull requests. Grit still works with a waitlist. The quickest way to try it is to book a demo with their founder and get access.

Pricing: Grit.io offers a free tier for personal and open-source use, and paid team plans starting at $39/contributor per month.