Must have AI tools
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Over the past decade, the speed of life has increased dramatically. And AI takes it even higher. While studying, my parents ate books to gain the necessary level of knowledge. The main skill of my generation is searching for information, we don’t need to process book after book, but we need to know where to find the right knowledge. AI is taking knowledge acquisition to new heights. And the ability to effectively use AI is becoming a must-have skill for professional growth.
Each person’s AI needs are unique, some need help creating music or writing a book. Others with optimizing routines or increasing creativity. So I can’t advocate for a perfect set of AI tools and am going to share my personal top 5 FREE AI tools for my day to day work in the world of software engineering.
ChatGPT — is the most useful tool. It is the current leader in content generation. I love to use it on daily basis, probably like googling. It can give a brief overview of technology or specific product, build a skeleton or plan for future. For example the next set of usecases ChatGPT gives for a simple prompt question: What are the top 5 problems that ChatGPT can help a software engineer?
- Code Assistance and Troubleshooting
- Documentation and Knowledge Retrieval
- Code Review and Feedback
- Project Management and Task Tracking
- Idea Generation and Problem Solving
Code writing is important part of my workdays. And AI optimisation allows me to eliminate a significant part of routine tasks from my daily work. Initially I started with Copilot during my first steps into AI development. However, recurrent payment becomes necessary after the end of the technical period. Therefore I replaced Copilot with Codium. Both tools provide incredible support in code generation. And the most important Codium tool has straightforward integration abilities with Intellij Idea and VS Code:
But code is not everything. Presentation of ideas and solutions takes a major part of my time at work. Thus presentation generation AI becomes highly valuable tool for me. Tome App managed to fulfil the missing gap of presentation generation instruments. It is free as well and easy to use. The most important is create clear vision of requirements and write as mush as possible explicit instructions. Of course the result is not even close to ideal. However amount of saved time is incredible. And it allows to spend released time on more valuable and meaningful information about a presentation topic.
And of course images. Every presentation or document feels empty without graphical filling. Most powerful and famous Images generators are Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. However first require monthly subscription and second requires own server configuration. And Playground AI doesn’t has those limitations and easy to use. Probably it is as powerful as top players, but Playground AI does required work perfectly fine for simple graphical filling in presentations.
Obviously the tool has limits, and it is 100 images per day. What is quite generous on my opinion. I asked Playground AI to generate an example of me writing this article. Even sample is quite good, I didn’t manage to get rid of beard 😅
The conclusion is simple. AI in its current state is not a replacement for human labor, AI is just a tool. And as we got used to computers and smartphones, we should also get used to artificial intelligence tools in our lives.
