Today is a very exciting day at Tabnine: I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Tabnine Chat in Beta!

Tabnine Chat is an enterprise-grade, code-centric chat application that allows developers to interact with Tabnine’s AI models in a flexible free-form way, using natural language.

While ChatGPT and other tools are useful for generating “first draft” code, Tabnine Chat aims to support the workflows of professional developers working on big projects, especially in enterprises, via several key attributes:

1. Tabnine Chat runs inside the IDE and is contextualized on whatever code you’re working on. This makes it useful not just for creating an app from scratch but also for incremental and highly contextual work, which is typically the nature of development in larger commercial projects.
2. Tabnine Enterprise customers can connect their repositories to Tabnine Chat, allowing it to assist with coding and answer questions based on internal projects. This is especially useful when the organization has a substantial set of internal APIs, libraries, services, and best practices that are being used.
3. Tabnine Chat is compatible with strict security and compliance requirements that many organizations have. Tabnine Enterprise also allows isolated environment deployment using virtual private cloud or on-premises deployment, ensuring total code privacy and security. In addition, Tabnine Chat was only trained on open source code with permissive licenses, guaranteeing that our models aren’t trained on GPL or other copyleft code.

What Tabnine Chat can do for developers

Our focus on developers was proven recently when Stack Overflow highlighted Tabnine as one of the two leading AI tools that developers are using. 

Tabnine Chat is a huge leap, expanding the applicability of Tabnine beyond code generation. Using Tabnine Chat is easy and intuitive, and at the same time flexible and powerful.

Here are some of the notable things developers can do with Tabnine Chat:

1. Explain a piece of code, which is especially useful when reading a new codebase.

2. Search your code repos using natural language, giving you the ability to “talk with your codebase.”

3. Generate new code based on natural language specs (e.g., “Create an app that reads the weather in London”).

4. Extend code with some capabilities (e.g., “Add logging to this code”).

5. Refactor code using human language (e.g., “Add type specification,” “Change convention,” etc.).

6. Generate documentation (docstrings) for specific sections of code.

7. Find issues in the code and fix them.

8. Generate unit tests.

This is just the tip of the iceberg! With some experimentation, I’m sure you’ll find creative and useful ways to really enhance your workflow with this exciting product. Learn more about Tabnine Chat’s use cases.

Enterprise benefits of Tabnine Chat

• Understanding and explaining current code: Developers write code and build applications in context, and the ability to understand the capabilities and intentions behind complex code changes the velocity for teams and organizations that are constantly changing and adding new teammates. Tabnine Chat can help developers understand their code better by providing insights into the code’s structure, intent, and performance. This can help developers debug code more quickly, identify potential problems, and make better decisions about how to refactor their code.
  
• Knowledge proliferation and accessibility: Large organizations can leverage Tabnine Chat to disseminate coding expertise, best practices, and lessons learned from the extensive codebase as well as data sources like Jira, Notion, documentation, etc. This makes knowledge more easily accessible to all developers and enables new team members to ramp up far more quickly. Tabnine Chat can also help to identify and share best practices across the organization, leading to improved code quality and productivity. In addition, code reuse results in fewer errors and increased consistency, reducing tech debt at later stages in the SDLC. 
• Quality assurance and code consistency: Tabnine Chat can identify potential code issues, performance bottlenecks, or areas for improvement across the codebase. This allows organizations to proactively address issues and enhance the overall quality of the software produced. Tabnine Chat also helps ensure code consistency by providing recommendations for standardized coding practices. An added benefit is the reduced load during code reviews, which results in faster shipping of features and shortens the overall SDLC. 
• Continuous improvement and innovation: Organizations can extract valuable insights to drive continuous improvement and innovation by identifying emerging coding patterns, suggesting optimizations, and highlighting areas for refactoring or performance enhancements. Tabnine Chat can also help organizations identify opportunities for improvement and implement those improvements quickly and efficiently. 
• Standardization of coding practices: With Tabnine Chat’s personalized recommendations and understanding of the organization’s codebase, organizations can establish and enforce standardized coding practices across teams and projects. This can help to ensure consistency and maintainability of the codebase, which can lead to improved productivity and quality.

Want to try out Tabnine Chat? Click below to fill out the form and get an invite to the Beta, and let us know if there are any additional use cases you’d like to explore. We look forward to a quick Beta with our trusted testers and then rolling it out broadly to Tabnine Enterprise and Pro users in the coming months.