As a front-end engineer and technical writer, my work life revolves around crafting interactive, responsive and dynamic User Interfaces and writing about tech. I am always eager to learn new things and share my views about them through writing. About two weeks ago, I came across two different posts talking about Pieces while scrolling on X, my curiosity kicked in and I decided to take a look at what it was all about. Since that day, I can say that my development productivity levels have sky-rocketed 🚀.
Productivity is crucial for every developer as we want to complete tasks within a set timeframe to either beat a deadline, complete a project or have time to do some other things. Helping my fellow developers out is the reason why I decided to write this piece 😉
In this article, I will be reviewing the Pieces for Developers tool and how it can boost your output levels just like it did mine. Walk with me!
What is Pieces
Pieces is an AI-powered productivity tool built to streamline developers' workflow activities. I like to call it a Hub of streamlined workflow, seamlessly integrating essential aspects of a programmer's development process.
Before I started using Pieces, my code snippets, screenshots and general workflow activities tracking were all over the place. I used Notion, sometimes Notepad and I always leave many tabs open on my browser, so I can visit those specific webpages housing code snippets when I need them. You can imagine how long it takes to trace a particular code snippet and how hectic it is.
Awesome Pieces functionalities
One important thing to note as we dive into the incredible world of Pieces is that it is a developer-focused tool - tailored specifically to assist developers.
Pieces has many cool and useful functionalities. However, in this section, I will focus on the aspects that blow my mind and I use quite often.
Robust Snippet Management
Pieces offers a snippet management functionality that enables you to save a bunch of code snippets from both your browser and IDE to the Desktop App.
The Desktop app stores all saved snippets which can be accessed at any time and also keeps track of workflow activities.
Scenario: After saving some code snippets to Pieces, I decided to edit by adding a comment to it and later on, deleted the snippet. When you navigate to Workflow Activity, you will be able to view all actions performed on your snippets. This enables you to keep track of your snippets. Imagine, a snippet was deleted by mistake, all you need to do is to view your Workflow Activity and get an idea of what happened.
Shareable Snippet Link
One cool thing about how Pieces manages snippets is, you can generate a link that can be shared with colleagues or anyone on communication channels like GChat, Teams, Slack and emails to access your code.
To generate a shareable link on Pieces,
First, click on Generate Shareable Link icon.
Then, copy your personal link after generation.
You can now share this link with whoever you wish to.
NB: You only generate a snippet link once. The next time you want to have access to the link, it would be attached to the Context Preview of your saved snippet.
Live Context
This is a powerful and versatile copilot feature that intrigues me the most and I know you would find it interesting too. Pieces Live Context can scan across your system and be aware of what is going on. It helps you remember anything and interacts with everything. It captures all context gathered from your system, processes and stores them entirely on-device.
Scenario: I want to get my work day started and I lost track of where I stopped the previous day, that is where Live Context can come into play.
To use Live Context, you need to switch it on before you proceed to prompt the copilot.
Already, you get some Suggested Prompt options including a prompt of where we left off. Just a click and it lists the last actions you performed!
Context
You can also manually set Context for the copilot to read files, folders, websites, snippets or messages.
Scenario: I was given an assignment to revamp the web pages of a particular project so, I cloned the Github repository to my local machine. It was a huge Laravel project with many folders and I did not have a clue as to where the user view was located. Aha! I do have a tool that can help me out in that regard. Up steps Pieces.
All I need to do is to set the Context to Folders and add the folder.
Then, I proceeded to ask the copilot for the user view in the project folder. It took some time but it came back with an answer correctly pointing to the location of the file which is resources > views > user.
Synchronized Workflow
My complete Pieces suite consists of the Desktop app, Visual Studio Code extension and a Chromium Browser extension (Google Chrome). When saving snippets in my Chrome browser, they get added to your Saved Materials in the Desktop app in real time which keeps your work flowing nicely and smoothly.
On-Device Large Language Models (LLMs)
On the 4th of June, the famous ChatGPT was down and the whole world was talking about it. People who heavily relied on the Generative AI tool were left stranded, but with an LLM locally deployed in your machine, you will not have to worry about such occurrences. Pieces offer LLMs that can reside on your computer system which enables you to go about your development activities without having to be online.
Also, I love the fact that Pieces copilot is readily available on my Visual Studio Code where I do all my coding and also on my Chrome browser where I carry out my research. This makes it possible for me to carry the same copilot conversation across all these tools.
Where Pieces Can Improve
The response time of the copilot when using Live Context. When using Live Context for huge folders, the delay is understandable as it is going through a lot of files/folders. But, for more straightforward Live Context prompting, the response should be delivered much faster.
The related links attached to saved snippets ironically links some unrelated web pages.
Overall, I am impressed by the idea behind the development of this software. The Pieces team took into consideration the complexity of a programmer's development process and built a software that streamlined the workflow.
And can I also say that the team at Pieces are amazing. Always willing to answer questions and help you resolve any issues you encounter. Kudos to the Pieces Team!
Having had early access to the stable and soon-to-be-released features, I can say that Pieces is here to stay for a long time and will grow as developers seek workflow organization.
Want to try it out?
You can download Pieces for free here
If you have any questions about Pieces, leave them in the comment section.
You can also connect with me on LinkedInfor software-related posts and articles.
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