Top AI Assistants for Coding That I Use
In this article, I will introduce to everyone the AI Assistants in daily coding that I often use. These AI Assistants can handle many different functions and tasks: explain code, generate code, suggest code, and fix bugs,…
TONGYI Lingma — Alibaba Cloud’s AI Programming Assistant
Tongyi Lingma is an AI programming assistant developed by Alibaba Cloud that helps programmers speed up coding, optimize code, and debug more efficiently.
This tool is integrated into the Data Science Workshop ( ) and is optimized to work with the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
I use this AI Assistant the most among all types of AI.
What can Tongyi Lingma do?
Automatically generate code at line and method level
Just write the action name or just a little prefix, and the code will be automatically generated, if the code review is okay, you can apply it to your code.
Or you can chat and ask AI to generate more logic code for you based on the current context.
Create comments for code
Quickly explore the logic of code segments
You can ask Tongyi Lingma to quickly find out what the code functions are doing for you, it will explain and draw the component blocks in order of processing so that we can understand better.
Optimize code
Use Tongyi Lingma’s optimized function right at the function you need to execute, it will give you suggestions on coding and technical risks and suggest useful changes for you.
Generate UnitTest
We can ask Tongyi Lingma to generate unit test code like this:
Github Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a programming assistant AI developed by GitHub and OpenAI, integrating directly into IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains Rider,…
Github copilot is integrated into IntelliJ IDEA, making coding for software engineers more and more convenient and faster.
It can do all the things that TongYi Lingma can do, plus it can do inline coding, bug fixing, and generate code right on your code file, give it a command.
After experiencing many types, in my opinion, the most powerful part of Github Copilot is probably debugging. I find it handles problems extremely well and quickly. Of course, I don’t deny its other functions.
This product costs monthly and requires an online connection. In this article, I have a permanent edu email so I can use Github Copilot for free.
Google AI Studio
Google AI Studio is an online platform that makes it easy for software engineers and developers to test and refine AI models, especially Gemini. With an intuitive interface, you can quickly test prompts, generate source code, and export APIs to integrate into your applications.
While not a full-fledged chatbot, Google AI Studio still helps developers chat, code, and optimize AI workflows effectively. If you want to harness the power of AI in software development, this is a tool you can’t miss.
Generate code and instructions very quickly and accurately, below is me asking it to add logic to the existing function, it processes and generates unit tests quite accurately.
DeepSeek
Deepseek can be integrated into Intellij through several plugins such as: CodeGPT, Continue Dev,…
ProxyAI (old: CodeGPT)
ProxyAI is an AI plugin developed based on OpenAI GPT (GPT-3.5/GPT-4). This plugin is designed to integrate AI directly into JetBrains IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, etc., helping programmers interact with AI right in the working environment.
This plugin is not an official product of OpenAI or GitHub but is developed by a third party based on OpenAI’s API.
Example of using CodeGPT’s coding, it’s a bit slow but the code generated is very accurate and precise:
By default, you can use CodeGPT but it will be quite limited. Just test it to see if it meets your needs. You can customize it to use other Providers in the configuration section.
CodeWhisperer
Previously I wrote an article about how to set up and use you can see the details in it.
CodeWhisperer can suggest code based on context and request content quite well, but I don’t use it much, because many AI tools generate code at the global level rather than in each separate file.
Machinet AI, Mate
We get a 10-day trial before paying.
If you don’t want to pay for this plugin, you can use an IDE from Machinet, you can install it at
Mate is a standalone IDE that goes beyond being a typical programming assistant. It can understand your tasks, gather context from your project, plan your execution, and write code automatically, not just what you explicitly tell it to.
Mate supports all programming languages and can work alongside any IDE, including VS Code, JetBrains, Sublime, etc. Mate also has image recognition capabilities and, if enabled, can watch your screen to add more context about what’s going on.
Mate allows you to drag each of your code files to create context. I tested a few functions and found them quite good: explain code, generate code, etc.
Mate’s free plan uses the Gemini Flash model, while the Pro plan uses Pro/GPT-4o and supports maximum context lengths from 32k to 2M tokens.
Cursor AI
Cursor is an AI-powered IDE for programmers that helps write code, debug, and optimize code right in the source code editor (IDE). It works similarly to GitHub Copilot but has more powerful features.
Cursor is built on VS Code but has powerful AI built in from the start, however it is a bit inconvenient for IntelliJ IDEA users.
First you need to download Cursor, and then install it based on your operating system. Here I use a Macbook so I will choose the version for Mac.
Cursor is really powerful in all tasks, coding, explaining, generating unit test, fixing bugs, designing system,…
You can set up the response language based on the national language you want, the coding generated is quite standard and powerful.
Currently, many engineers who are familiar with Intellij wish that Cursor will develop more plugins to integrate directly into Intellij IDEA, however, the development direction of Cursor is a bit different and they do not want it to stop being a plugin.
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Originally published at on February 12, 2025.
