A New Coding Assistant Just Arrived...

Key Takeaways

it's no surprise that software engineering and programming is changing quickly AI is getting better and better just two years ago we had chat GPT and today we have all kinds of new AI tools coming out every single day I think at this point we all understand that AI is not going to replace our jobs it's simply going to change how we do them and it's definitely something that we need to embrace now with that in mind in this video I'm going to show you another new AI coding assistant one that's pretty cool and that you'll definitely want to check out now this is the Watson X code assistant which is IBM's AI powered tool to help developers streamline their processes and increase efficiency now this really helps you focus on the interesting and fun parts of coding while getting rid of all of that boring work so if you need to do things like document your code write a unit test understand what a complex function is doing you can rely on the AI coding assistant to do that well you can focus on the more interesting and fun parts now in this video I'm going to be showing you how to set it up it acts as an extension for VSS code or Eclipse it's also free to use under the free trial so let me give you kind of a quick showcase demo SL tutorial and you guys can see what you think of this AI coding assistant so I'm on the website here and I'll show you how to get it set up but I do quickly need to disclose that this video is made in partnership with IBM like I said before this is not a review IBM does not tell me what I need to say in this video this is simply a showcase and I'm just demoing the product you guys can make your own judgment and decide if you want to use it or not again it's free under their free trial so in order to check it out and start using it though you can press on try for free this is going to bring you to a page where you can sign in or create a new IBM account I already have an account so I'm just going to sign into that but for you make a new one and then it's going to direct you to the place where you can initialize the code assistant so once you've made your account it's going to take a second and then it will bring you to a page that looks like this now if there's some kind of tour showing up on your screen you can just end that you don't need to go through that and what you can do is simply press on installing the extension now again what this is going to do is work as a vs code or Eclipse extension and all we need to do is just get an API key for this once we have the API key then we can go into VSS code which is what I'm going to be using in this video just paste the API key in the configuration for the extension and then it will be good to go so in order to do that you clicked on that page then you can click on here where it says creating an IBM Cloud API key and then you can press here where it says IBM Cloud API Keys now if you don't want to go through all of those clicks I will just link this in the descript description cloud. ibm.com amapi Keys you can go to this page once you're signed in and simply press on create give the API key a name in this case I'll call it VSS code and everything else you can just leave as the default and then press create now I'm going to copy that API key and the next steps are going to happen in VSS code so let me open that up so I'm in VSS code and actually I'm using vs code insiders here this is like the Beta release of VSS code don't worry it's pretty much the exact same thing I'm just doing this so that my environment is as closely matched to yours as possible and I don't have all kinds of other extensions popping up anyways in order to get started here what we're going to do is go to the extensions Tab and we're simply going to search for the Watson X extension this is going to be the code assistant the first one here with this nice logo Watson X code assistant is the one that we want to install I did not mean to click on that so we're just going to press on install wait one second and then we can open the extension Pane and we can configure in okay so once it's installed you'll see it on the left hand side here click on that and then it's going to ask you to log in with your API key or you can run this locally with AMA but I'm not going to do that so I'm going to go log in going to press on allow I'm going to paste my API key and hit enter okay it's going to take a second and then you're going to see that the cloud window will pop open and now we're able to use this extension okay so you can see we've got a chat window here I'll quickly walk you through some of the main features then I want to open up an existing code base I have and show you how it works with that so obviously this can do things like code generation I can ask it to generate code I can also use slash commands so I can do something like SL document slocs SL exlain these are built into the assistant and they just make it a lot faster to perform common operations we also have the ability to tag different files now I'm not in a codebase right now so I'll show you this in a second but you can do at and then you can type the name of any file that you have in the current directory and you can reference it for context as well as that you can have multiple chat sessions here here so you can make new ones you can label them you can also go and have a prompt Library here which has some common prompts for operations that you might want to perform a lot so let me open up a project here that we can test this out on and then let's go from there so I just opened up a project here related to a web scraping API that I was building anyways you can see that we have a little bit of code and I've opened up the code assistant chat window now inside of here if I want I can tag different portions of my code for giving it context so I can do something like at scrape and then notice that I don't just have to tag a particular file which I could do scrape dop I can tag a function or a class or a model or whatever right or different portions of my code so I can say at scrape job and then I can ask it a question related to that anyways let's do a little bit of code generation here though so I'll say actually yes at uh scrape job can you generate another model for a I don't know let's say log of this model I'm not sure if that makes a lot of sense but let's see what that will do for us so it did that pretty quickly and you can see that I can copy it in and that's the result that I get now let's just make a new chat window let's go chat sessions new window what I can do as well if I want is I can use these buttons that you see here so we have explain document unit test so if I press on this for example explain it's going to say SL explain and then it's going to grab the scrape job and then it tells us exactly what this does so this code defines a SQL Alchemy model class I like that it has the buttons here because it's very fast in order to actually use that that and it works for classes functions obviously other programming languages as well now if I do something like document uh let's see if it can generate the documentation for us here and hopefully give us some kind of dock string okay so there you go we get that documented code and then if I paste that inside of here you can see that now this entire class has been documented with the attributes the methods we have the Adit we have the reer so it actually added some of those things that I don't believe I had on the class before of course we can also generate a unit test for this model if we wanted to so let's go ahead and do that sweet so when I pressed that it got the SL unit test scrape job and then you can see that it generates that unit test for me and then obviously I would need to put that in a testing file and set that up you can see that it's able to do that now as well as using the slash commands directly from the window here you also have the ability to do this from the command prompt so if you open up the command prompt with control shift p or command shift p you can do uh actually something like explain so if I say explain or explain this whatever I'm highlighted on will actually get explained using the Watson X code assistant if I do something like unit test same thing you can see that it pops up here and then I can press that and it's effectively the same command just from the command pallet in case you don't want to press these buttons and also if you want you can just highlight something right click it and then press on Watson X code assistant and then explain this in case it's not something like a function class Etc now I just opened some other code here which is a python automation script which automatically unsubscribes from emails and I want to show you there's another cool feature feat we have which is translate so I can actually translate code from one language to another so I can do something like SL translate to and then JavaScript and then I can just reference the code that I want so in this case it's in at main.py and then give this a second and it should give me the translation now in JavaScript okay so there we go we now have this code obviously I could copy it and put it in a Javascript file now beyond that we can also go to different languages so I can say something like slash so I'm going to go slash translate and I'm going to go to and maybe Ruby and then same thing I'm going to do at main.py if I just wanted a specific function maybe I just want to do the search for email I'll go at search for email and let's see if it can do that for us okay so there we go now we have our code generated in Ruby anyways if you guys code a lot you know how to use a code assistant better that I can explain in a few minutes here the point is you have the slash commands for useful operations you have the at and the tagging for context you can ask us to do things like translations which is quite cool if you want to get into the settings you can go here to settings in vs code you can type WCA for the Watson X code assistant and you can mess with all of this kind of stuff you can configure it with AMA you can access things from the command pallet as I showed you and overall this is a cool assistant it just works as an extension so it's not too intrusive which I like in the editor definitely useful and can help you increase your efficiency and streamline some of those processes if you guys do want to check it out again you can do that for free from the the link in the description if you enjoyed the video make sure to leave a like subscribe to the channel and I will see you in the next one [Music]