Top 14 AI Extensions for Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio now offers more than 4,000 AI extensions that can significantly boost your productivity as a software developer. In this article, I’ll highlight the most important tools to improve code efficiency and increase productivity.

1- Code GPT

source: VCS Marketplace.

This is a free alternative for official OpenAI API since Chat-GPT extension is deprecated due to privacy issues; you can read more about the issue in their GitHub Issues # 239.

Code GPT integrated with StackOverflow which allows you to get human answers to your questions and compare it with AI answer by right click and select Ask StackOverflow from the drop-down menu .

Important: To use GPT-4 you must request access to OpenAI in this link https://openai.com/product/gpt-4

Close and reopen the extension after updating. Or you can also use the command "Developer: Reload Window"

2- Blackbox

source: VCS Marketplace.

This free AI extension allows to enable code completion in 20+ programming languages including Python, Java, C and C++, C#, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, Go, TypeScript, Kotlin, MATLAB,R, Swift, Rust, Ruby, Dart, Scala. You can search Repos and code without the need to leave IDE and finds the results instantly

3- ChatGPT — Genie AI

c

Genie AI is the official alternative for Ghat-GPT with the same cool features such as:

• Store your conversation history on your disk and continue at any time.
• Get streaming answers to your prompt in editor or sidebar conversation.
• Customize what you are asking with the selected code. The extension will remember your prompt for subsequent questions.
• Automatic partial code response detection. If AI doesn’t finish responding, you will have the option to continue and combine answers.
• Copy or insert the code ChatGPT is suggesting right into your editor.
• Export all your conversation history with one click.

4- GitHub Copilot

source: VCS Marketplace.

This a monthly or Annually Subscription extension which can get you code suggestions in real-time, right in your IDE.

GitHub Copilot provides autocomplete-style suggestions from an AI pair programmer as you code. You can receive suggestions from GitHub Copilot either by starting to write the code you want to use, or by writing a natural language comment describing what you want the code to do.

You can start a free trial of 60 days here.

5- Tabnine

source: VCS Marketplace.

Tabnine is an AI code Assistant that makes you a better developer by increasing your development velocity with real-time code completion in all the most popular coding languages and IDEs. Whether you call it IntelliSense, intelliCode, autocomplete, AI-assisted code completion, AI-powered code completion, AI copilot, AI code snippets, code suggestion, code prediction, code hinting, or content assist, using Tabnine can massively impact your coding velocity, significantly cutting down your coding time.

This extension is a $12 / month subscription fee, and you can start your 14 days trail period here.

6- Denigma AI

source: VCS Marketplace.

This free awesome extension saves you time, effort, & errors reading & explaining a block or a file in a human readable English.

7- Mintlify Doc Writer

source: VCS Marketplace.

As the name suggests; this extension with just highlighting the code and click generate Docs, will generate your code documentation in supported Docstring formats such as:

• JSDoc
• reST
• NumPy
• DocBlock
• Doxygen
• Javadoc
• GoDoc
• XML
• Google

8- Readable-AI Generated Comments

source: VCS Marketplace.

This annually subscription extension of $ 19.99 will generate comments using AI in Docstring & Inline comments.

9- Kodezi AI

source: VCS Marketplace.

This extension offers 3 different tiers; a free tier of 50 credits per month, a Pro version starts from $ 6.99 per month for 8,000 credits, & Teams version with unlimited access.

Kodezi for VS Code uses Large Language Models trained on a Massive Code Dataset to

• Debug your code automatically
• Optimize your code.
• Convert Code from one programming language to another.
• Generate Documentation for your code.
• Generate Code from Natural Language Instructions.
• Kodezi Chat can help for instant solution by natural language processing.

They provide State of the art ecosystem for a programmer to 10x productivity to help you achieve milestones faster and to learn new possible solutions to complex problems and supports so many programming languages like JavaScript, Java, Ruby, C, Bash, Solidity, Python, Node.js, C++, Scheme, Go, Rust, Clojure, Haskell, Kotlin, Lua, C#, FSharp, Swift, R, Perl, Dart, Erlang, TypeScript, PHP, SQLite, Scala, Nix, Objective-C, CSS3, Sass, HTML, and XML.

10- Bito-AI

source: VCS Marketplace.

Bito uses OpenAI’s models to make it easy for you to write code, understand syntax, write test cases, explain code, comment code, check security, and even explain high level concepts.

This extension offers an extremely beneficial feature which enables you to start a workspace so that everyone with the same domain can automatically join or you can add teammates to your workspace to collaborate.

Take advantage of this extension while it’s still free as it still in beta version.

11- IntelliCode

source: VCS Marketplace.

The Visual Studio IntelliCode extension provides AI-assisted development features for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript and Java developers in Visual Studio Code, with insights based on understanding your code context combined with machine learning.

12- Azure Machine Learning

source: VCS Marketplace.

With more than one million installations, this free extension provides with all the service a ML may need such as:

• Build and train machine learning models faster, and easily deploy to the cloud or the edge.
• Use the latest open source technologies such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Jupyter.
• Experiment locally and then quickly scale up or out with large GPU-enabled clusters in the cloud.
• Speed up data science with automated machine learning and hyper-parameter tuning.
• Track your experiments, manage models, and easily deploy with integrated CI/CD tooling.

13- Azure Machine Learning — Remote

source: VCS Marketplace.

This extension is complementary to the Azure Machine Learning extension and is used to seamlessly connect VS Code to a remote Compute Instance.

Once connected to the compute instance, you can:

• Run and debug Python scripts and Notebooks, executing directly on the CI
• Traverse the remote filesystem and mounted fileshare
• Invoke commands in a remote terminal
• Clone and manage git repos

14- Dependency Analytics

source: VCS Marketplace.

With more than one million installations, this extension scans your your application for security vulnerabilities by just right click on a manifest file like (pom.xml/package.json / requirements.txt / go.mod) to display ‘Dependency Analytics Report’ for your application with Insights about your application dependencies:

• Flags a security vulnerability(CVE) and suggests a remedial version
• Shows Github popularity metrics along with latest version
• Suggests a project level license, check for conflicts between dependency licences
• AI based guidance for additional, alternative dependencies