This is 2024 and every other person is probably working on an engineering project.
Engineers are constantly on the lookout for tools that can elevate their work to new heights, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has rode a new wave bringing to life many AI tools that can help with automating tedious tasks, predicting project outcomes, and simplifying the work to actually code. With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data in a matter of seconds, automate repetitive tasks with just a few simple clicks, and enhance decision-making processes and iterations, AI tools are revolutionizing how engineers approach their projects.
With the rise of AI tools, aspiring entrepreneurs are experiencing unprecedented opportunities to launch their businesses with the barriers to entry have significantly lowered. Many of the intense labor are also now delegated to machines and automated at a fraction of the cost. With access to a plethora of affordable or even free AI resources, entrepreneurs can start pursuing their ventures, streamline operations, enhance productivity, and bring their ideas to life without the need for substantial upfront investments. As a result, the entrepreneurial landscape is more accessible than ever, empowering individuals with diverse backgrounds to transform their visions into reality.
In a three-part series, we are first unveiling the top 6 AI tools for engineering for transforming the workflow of engineers today. Whether you're designing complex structures or developing intricate software, these tools promise to supercharge your productivity so while you focus on your creative vision, let AI engineer it for you.
Github Copilot
Github Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant developed by GItHub in collaboration with OpenAI, and this tool is revolutionizing how developers are coding.
Designed by leaders in AI, Github Copilot is arguably one of the most popular tools out in the market for engineers to save up to 55% time in coding. Copilot has an AI coding assistant that helps elevate developer workflows, it answers questions about your codebase and problems with AI-based suggestions in real time within popular integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Neovim. It can also turn natural language prompts into coding suggestions based on the project's context and style conventions, with tailor-made answers based on your preferred tools, organizational knowledge, and coding preferences and best practices across a variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.
GitHub Copilot starts at $10 per month for individual developers, freelancers, students, and educators looking to try the service with code completion, AI chat assistance, basic privacy protections and limited customization. Business and enterprise plans offer more features such as user management, policy control, enterprise-grade security and IP indemnity, access to knowledge from top open-source repositories, and pull request summarization depending on the needs of developers. Additionally, verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open-source repositories can access GitHub Copilot for free.
Tabnine
Private. Personalized. Protected.
That is Tabnine, an AI code assistant for engineers to streamline code generation and automate repetitive and mundane tasks to let developers focus on the work they love. It is built on GPT3.5 with its own architecture and development. Trusted by millions of users and recognized by leading analyst firms such as in Gartner ® Critical Capabilities for AI Code Assistants where it is ranked first for code generation, code debugging, code explanation use cases, and second for code modernisation and artifact building and testing use case. This reliable AI tool is your personal coding assistant with zero data retention to protect your code privacy while getting total protection from IP liability with added protection through indemnification.
With the personalized AI of Tabnine supporting popular languages, libraries, and IDEs, while providing context-aware suggestions based on your existing codes and patterns, it has the ability to create bespoke models trained on your codebase. It helps to auto generate high-quality code, turn plain text into code, test and fix bugs, build better apps faster with AI chat for the entire SDLC.
Tabnine is free to use for everyone in the version that entails basic AI code completions, limited AI-powered chat using multiple models, and support for all major IDEs. The Pro version starts at $12 per user per month which includes best-in-class AI models, AI agents in the IDE to generate code, test, and docs, integration with Atlassian Jira to inform AI responses and generation with other workflow tools in the works, code recommendations exclusively drawn from permissively licensed codebase, switchable AI chat models, including models from Tabnine and third-party providers, with standard administration tools and protection. The $39 enterprise has more advanced tools for user and policy management, tracking, and IP indemnification, while having fully private deployment on SaaS or self-hosted (on-premises or VPC), personalized AI agents to your entire codebase and company standards, and guidelines (e.g., Bitbucket, GitLab, and more) on top of the Pro version.
Stepsize AI
Stepsize AI is another tool that productively enhances project management and reporting for engineering teams. It integrates issue trackers like Jira and Linear to automate the generation of insightful weekly updates and dashboards that keep track of product development progress and team alignment. By leveraging its Operational Intelligence Engine, it provides context-rich updates upon analyzing data from various sources and helps keep teams aligned and informed throughout the development cycle.
One of its key features include automated reporting based on activity from issue trackers, saving time for team members by eliminating the hassle for manual report creation while ensuring stakeholders are synced up with the latest updates and project status. The AI-generated reports provide contextual clarity to the metrics presented, highlighting trends and helping teams to understand and make informed decisions.
The platform also helps with risk identification, risk management, and mitigation strategies that help teams to stay on track with their projects simultaneously avoiding common pitfalls associated with project management. Stepsize’s standout feature is its zero-setup dashboards which are tailored to each team, allowing users to access visualizations that reflect their specific project needs, enabling them to view critical metrics without the usual overhead of dashboard configuration. It also employs robust encryption methods (256-bit AES) to protect both user data at rest and in transit, safeguarding the privacy of sensitive information.
For small teams or individuals looking to explore Stepsize, there is a free plan that allows for 20 open issues and editor extensions without any financial commitment. A Team plan starts at $19 per user per month which includes unlimited issues, editor extensions, pull request integrations, and integration with issue trackers, designed for a more comprehensive package managing technical debt and enhancing team collaboration. Business plans are also available starting from $49 per user per month with more organizational and management features to support bigger companies and businesses with their tasks, with the option to upgrade to a custom enterprise plan.
Mintlify
Mintlify is a documentation tool powered by AI to streamline the process of creating and maintaining software documentations. By automating the documentation workflow, Mintlify enables developers to focus more on coding and less on the often tedious task of writing documentation. It offers a robust set of features aimed at improving the efficiency of technical documentation, focusing on customization, collaboration, user engagement, and intelligent enhancements, perfect for those who are looking to optimize their documentation practices.
It offers fully customizable documentation options, allowing users to tailor content with custom components, JavaScript, and CSS while providing beautiful templates out of the box. The platform is built for collaboration, featuring tools that enable multiple users to contribute seamlessly, along with mechanisms for user feedback to ensure documentation evolves alongside code changes. With intelligent features like AI-driven edit suggestions and automatic translations, Mintlify helps teams produce high-quality content efficiently. Additionally, the platform provides analytics tools to understand user engagement and optimize documentation strategies. The API Playground allows users to test APIs directly within their documentation, while integrations with various tools streamline workflows.
Mintlify is available to use with many functionalities for its free plan such as custom domain support, built-in components library, in-app search functionality, and API playground for testing and exploring APIs. The Pro plan starts at $100 per month for 5 editors, with additional AI chat responses to enhance user interaction and experience, advanced analytics for tracking usage and engagement, chat analytics, custom subpaths for documentation organization (e.g., /docs) and user feedback mechanisms to gather insights from documentation users. Enterprise options are also available tailoring to your business needs with a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing uptime of 99.99%.
Bugasura
Bugasura is an AI-powered bug tracker app for bug reporting and resolution, streamlining the process to keep track of your bugs, all in one place. It also helps to identify and link similar bugs that appear to minimize time spent on finding bugs or duplicate reports. Especially for teams that are dealing with a large volume of bug reports, Bugasura helps to also automatically capture essential details like screenshots and device information while suggesting bug description, severity levels, and tags, significantly reducing the time for engineers spent on documentation.
Its contextual feedback tool also comes with built-in annotators that allows users to highlight areas of concern directly on the screenshots, which is useful for providing pixel-perfect feedback and easier for developers to understand the exact nature of the bug. This is best for website feedback and frontend testing.
In addition, Bugasura integrates with various development tools such as GitHub, JIRA, and Slack, allowing for a smooth workflow across different platforms. Users can import and export issues in formats like CSV and JSON, making it easy to manage bugs across multiple systems. This also helps with facilitating among team members, getting everyone involved on the same page.
The platform also features custom workflows and sprints, which automatically assign issues, customize issue fields, attach voice comments, create public projects, and streamlining work sprints. There are also advanced filters and sortings to help find exactly what users are looking for inside each project with a simple global search.
This app is free for up to 5 users with unlimited projects, unlimited issues, and basic bug tracking functionalities, while the Growth plan starts at $10 per 5 users per month with advanced bug tracking tools, real-time collaboration features, and customizable workflows on top of the free features. For teams that need more comprehensive tools, the Pro plan starts at $25 per 5 users per month with additional integrations like Jira and Chrome Reporter, and enhanced priority support. Bulk pricing may be available for larger teams or long-term commitments with custom plans available for larger organizations that may want self-hosting solutions, annual license and maintenance.
Cursor AI
Cursor AI is also an advanced AI-powered code editor built on Visual Studio Code, designed to enhance developer productivity through a range of features such as Cursor Tab, an intelligent native autocompletion tool and helpful editor for code suggestions, real-time error detection and debugging assistance, and the ability to use natural language commands for coding tasks. The tool includes a context-aware chat function for querying the codebase, supports multiple programming languages, and allows for customizable workflows. Additionally, it also utilizes various AI models, such as GPT-4 and Claude, to provide tailored suggestions and improve the overall coding experience.
In terms of pricing, Cursor AI is free for most users who want to try out the software for its free to use features utilizing its 2000 completions and 50 slow premium requests, making it accessible for a wide range of developers. For those seeking more advanced features, there is a Pro plan available at $20 per month, with unlimited completions, 500 fast premium requests per month, unlimited slow premium requests, and 10 o1-mini uses per day. Business plans start at $40 per user per month for developers who are looking to enforce privacy mode org-wide, with centralized team billing, and an admin dashboard with usage stats on top of all the features.
In conclusion, selecting the right AI development tools aids to increased productivity while minimizing human errors. With AI permeating into almost every aspect of today’s world from programming to task management, its technology is slowly reaching far beyond human capabilities in terms of its scalability and productivity level. We hope that these tools suit what you are looking for, and while you focus on making the end product however you imagine, let AI do the rest to achieve that.
If you are also a technical founder building your own MVP or product and are considering expanding and scaling your team, CoffeeSpace is an invaluable resource to explore that has no AI replacements yet for an intricate cofounder matching platform. Unlike traditional networking methods, CoffeeSpace has tailored filters and personality prompts to match users based on each user’s preferences, increasing the likelihood of finding the right fit for your startup. By simplifying the cofounder search process, CoffeeSpace allows you to focus on what truly matters — developing your product and growing your business.
If you are ready to start exploring your own ideas and find someone to get off the ground with, join CoffeeSpace’s expansive global network here!
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