It’s 2024, my friends! Put StackOverflow in the box with fax machines and wired telephones (I’m joking, StackOverflow, but the rest of you, listen up!). It’s the era of AI, for better or worse, and so while Boston Dynamics works on their horror-movie robots, we must arm ourselves with the best in AI technology to fight back against our AI overlords, for the sake of our corporate masters.
So, with our jokes placed slightly to the side and our scene set, here are the Top 5 AI Tools For Developers in 2024!
5. OpenAI APIs
Starting things off here with a bit of a strange one, but in my not-so-humble opinion, the OpenAI APIs can be great tools that can be used to create many incredible applications.
First among the APIs is the flagship, of course, the GPTs. These neural networks are capable of responding to questions, analysing text, and generating responses. Perfect for a chatbot, internal database analyst, or procedural game!
However, there’s more to the tech giant than their talkative robots, starting with…well, a different kind of talkative robot. OpenAI also provides a high-end voice API that can read any text. They also have image generation, computer vision and audio-to-text APIs that can be powerful additions to many projects, as has been demonstrated by one of my favourite online AI explorations, though it’s perfect for more serious projects too.
4. Notion
If you haven’t got a notion of what this product is (I’m sorry), then you’re missing out, because Notion is an app I constantly have open. At its core, it’s a notes app…and a wiki, and a collaboration tool, and a productivity manager and- I think you get the picture.
Notion is an incredible, multifaceted tool. You could almost say it’s got notions. It has a huge array of use cases and is a welcome addition to any developer toolkit. Personally, I use one Notion account to keep track of my personal obligations and things I want to learn, and another (which I can switch to seamlessly) to manage all of my professional projects (be they solo or collaborative) to ensure I never forget anything.
Anyway, that’s not all. Sure, you’ve seen internal wikis before. Maybe (definitely) even project management software. But could you ask your database a question and get a fully articulated answer? If your answer is no, then you’ll love Notion and if your answer is yes, you already have it installed. All your data, combed through and searched by an expert AI in order to provide you the perfect answer and meaning you don’t have to ask your annoying coworker what the API key is for the Stable Diffusion API project (sorry Larry, Notion AI is just better).
And finally, all this functionality is at your fingertips, on your phone! Yes, you heard that right! Notion is available as a web app, desktop app, and even phone app! Now wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you can always update your project roadmap.
3. Zapier
“But ChatGPT I mean Eoghan,” I hear you say, “What use is all this if I can’t have my APIs automatically send an angry voice note to Larry whenever he adds my name to a project task?”. Well, with this next tool, you can! And what’s better, but you can do it just by telling the tool to make your automation. Yes, it’s the man the robot, the myth the real program, the legend the beautiful piece of software, Zapier!
With a simple typed request, you can create an automation for just about anything. Zapier integrates…well, I was going to list the products, but if I did that we’d be here forever, so just assume that if it’s connected to the internet, Zapier can use it!
With all of these integrations and the added bonus of AI (either through Zapier itself, or using ChatGPT), it has never been easier to automate workflows, but if you require that granular control, Zapier is here for you too, allowing you the power of IF, ELSE, and THEN, but for your most used apps. So now you don’t have to spend hours building and debugging your custom automations, Zapier is here to make your life just that little bit easier (not me though, it makes my life way easier instead).
2. Zerve
Actually, continue on now, I want to keep Zerve all to myself. I won’t tell you, for example, that Zerve is an IDE built from the ground up for developing LLMs and other AI tools. I also won’t let you in on the fact that Zerve allows seamless language interoperability. Nor will I tell you how it’s a beauty to work with, with a sleek, modern cork board interface with powerful, beautifully stable collaborative functions that might almost make Larry and myself get on.
Ah, fiddlesticks, I said all that out loud and the AI assistant I built with Zerve heard and typed it all out for me.
Well, I guess now I should probably just tell you that Zerve is great and if you want to work with AI, you should give VS Code a kiss goodbye and come join me over in the beautiful word of Directed Acrylic Graphs (pretty cork boards) where our pipelines are so efficient they’re featured in video games about Italian plumbers who rescue princesses from evil lizards (It’s okay, Nintendo’s copyright AI isn’t built with Zerve so it won’t be smart enough to strike this).
It’s ChatGPT. You knew it was ChatGPT when you clicked on this article. It will be ChatGPT for the foreseeable future and that’s because ChatGPT is just that good.
– You want to know some syntax? Here you go!
– You want your uncommented code explained? Never fear!
– You want an entire web application that rivals Notion in its cleanliness? Well, I’ll make no guarantees as to the quality if you just copy and paste GPT’s every word, but it’ll be a great asset to you when you forget a semicolon on line 432 that your IDE doesn’t up on for some reason (probably because it isn’t Zerve).
Look, ChatGPT is unrivalled in its prowess and versatility. It can teach you to make shrimp fried rice, write in iambic pentameter, or perform recursive CTEs in SQL. This broad range makes it incredibly powerful, and OpenAI’s commitment to constantly improving it (now with incredible speeds with their new FREE GPT-4o) means it’s unlikely to become irrelevant any time soon.
However, if you are a coder through and through and you hate fried rice, then you can forgo all the ChatGPT bloat and reduce your copypasta by getting GitHub Copilot instead, which runs off a GPT-3.5 model. Copilot (the GitHub one, not the Microsoft one or the airline one) is integrated directly into a number of popular IDEs, so it can read the code you’re currently working on and provide real-time suggestions to speed you up, as well as answer questions with your code as context (without you having to repeatedly paste 2,000 lines of Python code into a chatbox every time you want to ask a question).
This makes it an extremely powerful alternative to ChatGPT, although as of right now, the advantages of GPT-4o over GPT-3.5 might just be worth all the copy pasting.
Well, I hope this has been some help, or some entertainment at least. If you’re interested in these tools and others like them, come on over to the PorterShed for our spectacular GenAI Hackathon on June 21st and 22nd.
And if you’re not interested in these tools, then come down anyway – I’ll be more than happy to change your mind.
By Eoghan Collins
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