GPT Code Clippy, the Open Source Version of GitHub Copilot

I’m also surprised at the lack of competition. I’ve been using Tabnine since last summer.

Tabnine was so compelling I posted here not long after using it that AI-based code completion was being slept on, because it was obviously so much better than what the IDE could do. [1]

I pointed out that Microsoft was uniquely positioned to offer superior code completion services due to its fire-hose access to new code on GitHub.

Interestingly, the top reply from ptx was their “hope we'll also see a strong counter-movement of simple tools for independent developers.” Which is just what Code Clippy seems to attempt.

I continue to think AI-based code completion and AI assisted code quality recommendation services will be the differentiator as so much of IDE features are commoditized.

The big missing party in my view is Apple with Xcode. Not only do I think Xcode needs it’s own local-capable AI code completion, I think Apple needs a semi-social GitHub-like repository service of its own to help feed this AI.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074393

The app seems very interesting, I only wish that you can publish the extension to open-vsx.org so that people who are using VSCodium and Code-OSS in general can use it.

It's not. It's basically the same model as GPT-3 (though smaller), and generally speaking the vast majority of its outputs should not be anything in its training set. The big exception is code that showed up many times in the training data (like the famous inverse square root function).

It is based on a machine learning model. I've been using it for a couple of months now and the suggestions are generally speaking surprisingly good. It has been able to usefully complete very obscure things, like parts of a PEG grammar for parsing Quake-C. I'm not using it to generate implementations of algorithms from scratch (because it just doesn't have enough data to do that properly), but rather as a fancy extension of regular code completion.