There has been a lot of hype surrounding AI coding tools. So far there are two main categories of tool:
- Autocomplete tools, where GitHub Copilot is the best known brand.
- Chat tools where you copy-paste your existing code into a text box, ask the AI to do things to it (refactor, explain, add tests, etc.) and then copy the answers out. You can do this in a web browser, or there are IDE plugins to make the process easier and more powerful.
All of these categories of AI tooling are available to Eclipse users. As a quickstart, if you just clone this repo and then run ./gradlew equoIde or ./mvnw equo-ide:launch (depending on your preference), then you'll get an example project setup with all of the plugins that we are talking about, as well as some code to tinker with.
GitHub Copilot is not available for Eclipse right now, but Tabnine provides exactly the same concept. Compared to Copilot, Tabnine has the bonuses of a free tier and the option to self-host.
You can install Tabnine from the Eclipse marketplace, but in this demo we are using EquoIDE to handle installation.
If it's not working for you, make sure to click the 
Tabnine Starter in the bottom right and login to your Tabnine account.
There is another plugin to watch in this space called eclipse.copilot. It doesn't support copilot-style "ghost text" (and doesn't plan to), but you might prefer the GitHub Copilot completions over Tabnine.
When it comes to chat-based tools, the trick is to say "this is the code I have, this what I want you to do with it". It is shocking how effective it is.
You can also ask ChatGPT to write code from scratch. The combination of its domain knowledge plus coding ability is surprisingly effective.
The demos above are all using GPT-3.5 which is free. GPT-4 is much more powerful, but API access is currently gated behind a waitlist. Luckily, if you subscribe to ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month, you get GPT-4 access within the web interface right away. The demos above use the web interface, so you can use GPT-4 for coding tasks without sitting on a waitlist.
If you do some googling around "Prompt engineering", you'll see suggestions to start every chat session with "You are an expert Java programmer" to put the LLM into the "right mood" for best generating your code. You can also ask the LLM to make its answers as brief as possible, or to explain each step in detail.
The Equo ChatGPT plugin let's you put these best practices into templates so that you don't have to repeat yourself. It also copy-pastes your code into the chat window for you, to save a step and remove a possible source of errors.
The Equo ChatGPT plugin was inspired by another Eclipse plugin called AssistAI. AssistAI has the advantage that it integrates with the Eclipse context menus, but the disadvantage that it requires an API key - ChatGPT Plus isn't enough.
If you have other tools to share, or if you have any trouble running the demos in this repo, join up in the discussion section.