AI generated code IDEs like Replit, Cursor.sh and plugins into vscode are all the rage now a days. I blogged earlier on using continue.dev in vscode and using online model for code generation.
They are all priced between $12-$20/month and require a subscription (API Key) to a inference engine (OpenAI) on top of that. You can avoid all these fees, if you run your model locally. I tried that using ollama locally on my laptop and pick a 7B or smaller model (I like codestral). It is slower but completly usable.
That works well for hobbyist but what about teams in software factories? Writing code as a group is different workflow. GenAI powered tools will need to evolve to fit the team workflow. e.g. doing a diff between two code bases. Increasing the code context to include the whole team and not just my code base.
There is also a thing I noticed, it works well for 3rd and 4th generation languages, but not for assembly/C. It does not understand compiler optimizations yet. Charging $20/month for this early alpha type functionality is not worth it imho. You can get equivalent general purpose code generation for free without seeing this error
The impressive part of code IDEs is not that they generate code, it is that they can summarize your code for comments and audits. That may be the use case we want to focus on.
