Pair Programming with AI: How Cisco Works with Tabnine

When I was learning to write Python, I did a lot of pair programming. Pair programming is where two engineers/developers work using only one machine – taking it in turns to write code (often coding every 15 minutes and swapping over). This technique is awesome for learning from each other. As our team members are now all working from home and in different time zones, collaboration has become a lot more challenging.

Enter the Tabnine AI code completion tool and team learning

Tabnine can be installed directly into an IDE, and works like an autocomplete tool. That is, it predicts what you want to write based on the best match for code that you are writing. It does this by learning coding patterns based on the code you/your team has written previously, as well as best open-source coding practices. Tabnine then creates customized suggestions that should be a good match for the rest of the code you are writing.

While preparing for DevNet Create 2021, a few of the Developer Advocates on our DevNet team began working together to build some code examples for the upcoming sessions and demos. We found that by using Tabnine our productivity went up by 50%! Collaborating on building code and sharing knowledge of an SDK for an API can be puzzling if you have not used the SDK or API before. Tabnine helped our developer advocate team work together to be faster, more consistent, and secure as we built our demos. Tabnine was learning all our team coding practices and patterns as we progressed!

Tabnine can work in any IDE – shown here in VSCode

You can create a team in Tabnine and add people with whom you wish to collaborate. Tabnine then learns the coding practice from all the collaborators on the team! What’s more, your Tabnine team is safe and secure. The learning algorithm created for your team is strictly exclusive – made and delivered only for your approved team members.   Tabnine’s AI code completion models can be run locally on your machine.

The Teams level takes Tabnine’s AI-powered capabilities beyond the individual developer

See Tabnine in action at DevNet Create

I have been a Tabnine user for around two years now. So, at DevNet Create 2021 I am pleased to be able to speak with Brandon Jung, VP Ecosystem and Business Development at Tabnine. In this technical session you’ll discover how Tabnine helps developers easily adopt new Cisco API SDKs in whichever IDE you love.

You can watch this session at DevNet Create at the following times: