PALO ALTO, Calif. – May 4, 2023 – Metabob announced today a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual studio code (VSCode) extension for its debugging and refactoring tool that the company says speeds software development code review by 60 percent. It provides users with functional context-sensitive code recommendations to fix errors right in the integrated development environment (IDE) – and it is specifically trained to fix code generated by AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT.
There is a growing use of AI systems for code generation, however, code is still mainly reviewed either manually or by using rule-based systems. Both approaches have drawbacks: manual review is time-consuming and rule-based systems work only on predefined rule sets to identify bugs. Also, rules-based systems only find pre-defined coding errors and, since they do not understand code logic and context, they tend to flag irrelevant issues that waste review time.
“With recent advancements in AI, we set out to solve this problem and free up time for developers. Software developers are valuable for their ability to produce code, and their productivity is reduced when fixing bugs,” said Massi Genta, CEO, Metabob. “The VSCode extension helps to make our tool available to even more developers. This way, Metabob’s AI can quickly find and explain errors in plain English and recommend solutions on how to fix them.”
Metabob (and the VSCode extension) is trained on millions of bug fixes of both human- and AI-generated code. This has allowed the tool to learn to detect complex problems spanning across code bases that require an understanding of code logic and context. In fact, over the last two years, Metabob has collected feedback from close to 1,000 developers to perfect the tool. Today, Metabob can perform AI-based reviews on Python code and is one of the fastest-growing tools on GitHub.
“We are excited to announce the new release of the Metabob VSCode extension,” said Shige Ihara, president and CEO, of NEC X. “NEC Corporation has recently announced its policy to use generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to enhance employee efficiency and productivity. Aligning with the policy, NEC X has already started discussing with several NEC groups the use of Metabob in their software development process. We are very confident about Metabob’s bug detection and recommendation abilities, and we believe it will contribute to improving the quality and efficiency of software development for NEC group companies as well as other enterprises and individual developers.”
“In the current business climate, where companies are laying off software developers in droves, efficient, automated code review is more important than ever before,” said Genta. “We are confident that Metabob will play an important role in increasing the productivity of developers and their teams.”
