Using Codeium in VS Code

#codeium #vscode

Hi everybody, I've been a happy user of Codeium for a little while (I am definitely not affiliated with the developers of Codeium and I have no vested interest in promoting it, I just like it) and wanted to share why I like it.

Codeium is a free AI code assistant. You could think of it like Github Copilot, but free. I know what you might think, "if it's free you are the product", but in this case it's actually freemium. For enterprise usage there are costs, which seem definitely worth it for an enterprise, but for individuals it's free to use. They don't train on your data, either.

I like it primarily because its completions are amazing! It can often write much of a function while you're still coming up with the concept, and even better, the code is quite high-quality, with the caveat that you should NEVER trust an AI tool to verify the accuracy or security of code. It's not always the fastest at producing a suggestion, but it's still faster than a human typing.

Codeium's function explanations are not very helpful in my opinion. They're too fine-grained and essentially just tell you what the function is doing step-by-step, which is exactly what I could read the code to figure out. What I'd prefer to have explanations do is provide a broader explanation or summary of the purposes of a function and maybe why it does something in a certain way if it's an unfamiliar coding paradigm.

Have you tried Codeium? A lot of people are anti-AI in development, a lot of people are essentially just using AI to write everything. I feel the latter is absolutely wrong and AI just isn't that trustworthy on accuracy/security. The former is probably fine, it just could be leaving efficiency on the table. Definitely don't use AI for everything, but if you want to, figure out how it can assist you. Let me know your thoughts on Codeium.