My AI helpers, CodeRabbit and SourceGraph Cody

I’ve been an early adopter of AI coding tools. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot from the technical preview stages in 2021. It was mind-blowing to me. The interface was pretty minimal compared to what we have now, but even at the stage, it was revolutionizing the way I work. I’ve dreamed for a long time about programming without having to actually write all the code, and it was starting to become a reality. All in all, I was pretty happy with it.

Last year, I discovered Cody from SourceGraph. I’ve tried the trial and I was hooked. It had so much more context about the code I’m working on. I could just select a function, tell it to refactor something on it, and it would do it directly in my editor. Writing documentation, generating tests, writing new code, everything become easier. I’ve used it last year to write a replacement of the acoustid-index server, something I’ve been planning for a long time, but I decided to also learn a new language, Zig, on the project. Cody made the process really effortless. It included countless refactoring, as I was still learning the right patterns in the language, and I was doing most of the work without actually writing the code myself. This year, I’ve started using the chat with thinking models a lot more often, and Cody’s ability to apply the code blocks from the chat to the editor. Even better, I’m actually using this for free, as part of their support for open source. It’s such a good tool that I’d be happy to pay for now, and will definitely start doing that once my current free license expires.

And this year I discovered CodeRabbit for automated code reviews. I was super skeptical about this, but they also have a free plan for open source projects, do I decided to give it a try. I’m maintaining AcoustID alone, so having another set of eyes looking at the code, even if mechanical ones, is welcome. And I was blown away. On the first pull request, it actually found a small logical error I had in the code. And this kept happening again and again. After some time, I switched it to the assertive profile, and now I actually enjoy opening a pull request and going through the suggestions it makes. Yes, sometimes they are obsessive, but that’s OK. I’ve tried alternatives, like Gemini or Copilot, both having options to do code reviews, but the level of quality is somewhere completely elsewhere. Gemini and Copilot feel like useless toys compared to CodeRabbit.

The last four years have completely changed my approach to programming, and for the better. As good as all these new AI tools are, I don’t really expect them to be replacing technical programming jobs. You really need to evaluate their outputs, and if you are not able to do that critically, you will deal with a lot of bullshit code. But if you can judge the quality of the output, these are great helpers and I’m really looking forward to what the future brings.