Programmer's Helper

TabNine, a maker of programming tools, released Deep TabNine, an app that installs on your text editor of choice and fills in code as you type.

How it works: Deep TabNine is based on OpenAI's GPT-2, the text generator that penned a decent dystopian short story based on a single sentence from George Orwell’s 1984. Trained on open-source code, it predicts the next chunk of code, as illustrated in the picture above.

• Deep TabNine was trained on 2 million Github files.
• It supports 22 programming languages.
• Individuals can buy a license for $49. Business licenses cost $99.

Behind the news: Predictive tools for coding have existed for years, but they're typically geared for a single language and base their predictions largely on what has already been typed, making them less useful early in a project. Thanks to GitHub, Deep TabNine is familiar with a range of tasks, algorithms, coding styles, and languages.

Why it matters: Deep TabNine cuts coding time, especially when typing rote functions, according to evaluations on Reddit and Hacker News. Compounded across the entire software industry, it could be a meaningful productivity booster. And that doesn’t count the doctor bills saved by avoiding screen-induced migraines.

We’re thinking: Pretrained language models like GPT-2 are opening new, sometimes worrisome possibilities for text generation. Could this be the start of a new, powerful wave of AI-driven coding tools?