AI coding tools have firmly established themselves in the software development field and are expected to remain a valuable resource.
Developers have shown a strong preference for these tools, and surveys indicate that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. For instance, GitHub conducted a study revealing that 70% of participants believe that AI coding tools will provide them with a competitive edge in their work.
In this context, production speed and quality are some of the main features that developers are looking for in their new AI coding assistants. Enter Phind, an innovative platform designed to excel in answering highly technical coding-related questions in just 10 seconds. The company behind the tool states it can write better programming code in less time (10 seconds vs 50 seconds) compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4, especially when it comes to highly technical coding-related questions.
Phind Model V7, as per its developers, is engineered to surpass GPT-4’s coding capabilities, achieving performance levels similar to GPT-3.5 but with a fivefold increase in speed.
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What is Phind, and How Does It Work?
HumanEval measures how well an AI system or machine learning model performs by having human judges assess its output. The judges rate the responses generated by the AI model on how accurate, relevant, and useful they are.
For language models like GPT-3 and Phind, HumanEval is used to see how well they can answer questions in a way that is coherent, precise, and helpful, and Phind V7, based on an enhanced version of CodeLLama 34B, is one of the first models to beat GPT-4’s score on this measuring system.
In fact, Phind Model V7 has achieved a remarkable score of 74.7% on HumanEval and significantly outperforms GPT-4 when providing responses to real-world questions.
We beat GPT-4 on HumanEval with fine-tuned CodeLlama-34B!
— Phind (@phindsearch) August 25, 2023
Here's how we did it: https://t.co/Dgw4IU1BVx
🚀 Both models have been open-sourced on Huggingface: https://t.co/aKtlAVRWcE
Phind: Main Features and Capabilities
Phind is remarkably versatile, whether you have a general coding request or a specific question, involving sharing code snippets or correcting errors. The platform allows you to provide a thorough description of the programming code you want to obtain.
The Phind model excels in speed. This remarkable acceleration, up to five times faster than GPT-4, is made possible through the utilization of H100s hardware and the innovative TensorRT-LLM library from NVIDIA.
In practical terms, Phind attains a throughput of up to 100 tokens per second in a single-stream configuration, while GPT-4, as of today, manages approximately 20 tokens per second.
Work in Progress
At its current stage, Phind may require more iterations to arrive at the correct answer compared to GPT-4. However, the San Francisco-based team ensures they will continue enhancing the model in the following releases. You can find the latest models used on Huggingface (open source!)
Dev Coding Friend
If you are looking to debug and test your code, then you can try the “Pair programmer” option, which is much like collaborating with a fellow dev. This option behaves more conversationally and this approach can help you spot bugs or oversights in your original code.
Visual Studio Code Extention
You can also use Phind to help you with searching, debugging, and resolving terminal errors on Visual Studio Code. Find the extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace and install it from there. This plugin is free and currently in Alpha version, with more than 23,400 installs.
On Visual Studio Code, Phind offers some of the following features:
- Code selection search: You can select a section of code and press
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Ito start searching with your selection. Phind will try to find relevant documentation, code samples, and other resources to help you understand and use the code you’ve selected. - Code rewriting: You can select a section of code and press
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Mto automatically rewrite the selection based on your instructions. This can be useful for refactoring code, fixing bugs, and making other changes. - Terminal output search: If you have a terminal open, you can press
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Lto ask Phind about the terminal output. Phind will try to identify the errors and warnings in the output, and provide suggestions for how to fix them.
Phind: Subscription plans and Tokens
Phind works on different subscription plans, but opens its doors to all without any cost up to a maximum of 10 daily queries, setting itself apart from ChatGPT-4, which asks for a monthly subscription fee of $20.
Heavy users might opt for the Phind Plus subscription (30 uses per day and private Discord server) for $15 dollars monthly, or the Phind Pro Option for $30 which consents to +500 uses a day and other premium features.
One of Phind’s remarkable features is its expansive context window, stretching to 16,000 tokens—12,000 for input and 4,000 for web results. In comparison, ChatGPT-4 offers a more limited 8,000-token window. (However, both OpenAI and Phind will probably update this in future versions and different plan options)
The AI Coding Tool Environment
Phind joins a host of innovative tools and models designed to enhance the way we generate programming code. GitHub Copilot, Cody, CodeLlama, Jasper, Codeium, and Amazon CodeWhisperer are just a few examples of the exciting options available to developers and non-devs alike.
These tools, including Phind, are revolutionizing the software development process, offering developers an array of powerful solutions to make their coding tasks more efficient and effective than ever before. Despite some initial reluctance, recent surveys show that devs are accepting and using more and more of these AI tools every day, mostly because of the time-saving benefits.
With this diversity of options, developers have more choices than ever to tailor their coding experience to their specific needs, resulting in a more productive and dynamic development environment.
