Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Gartner defines AI code assistants as tools that generate and analyze software code and configuration.   LEADERS GitHub Amazon Cognition (Windsurf) Gitlab Google Cloud CHALLENGERS Anysphere (Cursor) Alibaba Cloud VISIONARIES Tencent Cloud IBM JetBrains NICHE PLAYERS Harness Qodo Tabnine Augment Code Notes - Alibaba Cloud’s Lingma roadmap and product design focus heavily on Qwen, the company’s proprietary model, with little attention given to offering model choices or fostering broader ecosystem flexibility. AWS shows impressive innovation by bringing its AI features to a variety of IDEs like its new AI-native IDE, Kiro as well as to terminals and DevSecOps platforms with integrations for GitHub and GitLab. It has also led the way with specialized agent solutions, especially its modernization-focused code transformation agent . Cursor has a solid history as an early innovator, bringing in features that have since become key to AI-native IDEs. Augment Code shines when it comes to c...

Today's AI coding tools look like fierce competitors, but they're all built on each other's work.  Today’s AI-powered IDEs like Cursor, Windsurf, Kiro and many others all stand on the giant shoulders of open-source work contributed by companies that once battled each other in the browser wars.  Windsurf, for example, is a fork of Microsoft’s VS Code. VS Code itself runs on Electron, which is built on top of Chromium and Node.js. Chromium comes with Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and uses Blink, a fork of Apple’s WebKit.  So even when Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Apple compete publicly, their code ends up powering each other’s tools behind the scenes. Open source has turned “tech rivals” into “reluctant collaborators,” whether they planned it or not. The AI Model Dependencies The same pattern exists with AI models. Competing IDEs use each other's models, hosted on each other's clouds. GitHub Copilot (Microsoft) uses : OpenAI models (GPT-4.1, GPT-5 family) - hosted o...

Stop wondering "Where can I watch this?" The BingeBuddy web app instantly shows you which streaming platform has your favorite movies & shows. You can also dive into a celebrity's filmography and the cast & crew details of movies. It's IMDb-lite. I co-created this web app with assistance from the Claude Sonnet 4 model in GitHub Copilot.   Check the code in my GitHub Web Apps repo . It's all in a HTML page powered by The Movie Database (TMDB) REST API and vanilla JavaScript - no libraries! Just get your own TMDB API key, replace it in the code and you can have your own local or hosted version. Your feedback is always appreciated.

I cleared the  GitHub Copilot certification exam today! While preparing for the exam, I stumbled upon several lesser-known GitHub Copilot settings and features. It’s been fun exploring them and I’ve already started putting my knowledge into action . I found the following resources helpful for preparation - MS Learn Modules: Microsoft Learning Path: GitHub Copilot Fundamentals Part 1 of 2  (2 hr 39 min, 6 Modules) Microsoft Learning Path: GitHub Copilot Fundamentals Part 2 of 2   (3 hr 10 min, 6 Modules) Microsoft Learning Path: Accelerate app development by using GitHub Copilot  ( 7 hr 7 min, 5 modules) Practice tests with answers and reasoning Video tutorials: GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 1: GitHub Copilot plans and features GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 2: Developer use cases for AI with GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 3: Testing with GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 4: Prompt Engineering 300

This Week I Learned - * OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 is now the new default model for Copilot Chat, Edits, and agent mode. * With the Vision Input feature in GitHub Copilot, you can: - Add screenshots of errors with Copilot to have it interpret the image and suggest solutions for the issue. - Share mockups of new designs, and Vision will help you bring them to life. - Ask questions about architecture diagrams. - Share a screenshot of a code snippet and ask Copilot to explain the code. - Share a flowchart and ask Copilot to describe the processes shown in the image. - Share a screenshot of a web page and ask Copilot to generate HTML for a similar page. * "People who use AI will replace those who don't" - Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO * EU will withdraw a provision that allowed citizens to sue AI companies for damages caused by their systems and required extensive reporting and disclosure. Critics accused regulators of defanging the AI Act to appease U.S. - The Batch * Gretchen Rubin is...

This Week I Learned -  *  Code golf - It’s a sport (of sorts) where people attempt to reduce the number of characters they use in source code in order to solve a problem. It tends to result in comically terse, virtually unreadable lines of code, but it still gets the job done.  *  Gergely Orosz on AI coding tools - These tools really feel like a massive multiplier for experienced devs - those of us who have it in our head exactly what we want to do and now the LLM tooling can move nearly as fast as my thoughts!  *  Google's Machine Learning Crash Course - 12 modules, 15 hours * Developers can ask GitHub Copilot questions in Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada or Telugu and get answers in the same script * How Americans spend the day - a data visualization: * The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. It is named after Alison Bechdel, who credited her friend L...

The English language is full of surprises, especially when it comes to pronunciation. With more than 19 vowel sounds represented by just five vowels (plus sometimes “y”), English can be a challenge—especially for non-native speakers. Many words contain silent or extra letters that make pronunciation tricky. If your native language follows phonetic spelling (where words are pronounced as they are written), you might instinctively apply the same logic to English. This can lead to unexpected mistakes—like pronouncing the “t” in ballet or being puzzled by why colonel is pronounced ker-nil . To help with this, I started compiling a list of such tricky words in a Google Spreadsheet. Then, I learned that Google Sheets can function as a read-only database , so I built a simple web app using the Google Sheets API and JavaScript to display the list online.  Check it out ! The pronunciations are from Google & WordWeb (created by a physicist, Antony Lewis).  Switching to Datasett...

A good way to understand commercial software products is to check features for its different pricing plans.  Here is the list of the 50+ GitHub Copilot features from its Pricing page - Chat Messages and interactions Access to OpenAI GPT-4o [Preview] Access to OpenAI GPT-4.5 [Preview] Access to Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet [Preview] Access to Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet [Preview] Access to OpenAI o1 [Preview] Access to OpenAI o3-mini [Preview] Access to Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Context-aware coding support and explanations Debugging and security remediation assistance Access to knowledge from top open source repositories Generate tests, docs, and more with slash commands Answers about issues, PRs, discussions, files, commits, etc. Web search powered by Bing [Preview] Explain failed Actions jobs [Preview] Multi-file editing in VS Code [Preview] Switch between models [Preview] Add images to prompts Code completion Real-time code suggestions [Preview] Next edit suggestions Comments to c...

This Week I Learned -  * Phi-4 is a 14B parameter state-of-the-art small language model (SLM) that excels at complex reasoning and conventional language processing. Phi-4 is available in GitHub Models. * You can now attach images and work with them directly in GitHub Copilot Chat. Share screenshots of errors and Copilot will interpret the image and resolve the issue.  * A group led by Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit controlling OpenAI, aiming to prevent the AI startup from becoming a for-profit company. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015 but left before it became successful. He later started a competing AI company, xAI, in 2023. OpenAI is trying to transition to a for-profit model to secure more funding for AI development. Musk sued Altman and others in August 2023, arguing they prioritized profit over public good. Musk believes OpenAI should return to its original mission of being open-source and focused on safety. * The gitingest service...

Summary of a recommendation from GitHub blog  (April 2025) Balance between cost and performance : Go with GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Fast, lightweight tasks : o4-mini or Claude 3.5 Sonnet Deep reasoning or complex debugging : Claude 3.7 Sonnet, o3, or GPT 4.5. Multimodal inputs (like images) :  Gemini 2.0 Flash or GPT-4o. Currently you can switch between 5 AI Models within the Copilot Chat interface. The OpenAI Models are hosted on Azure tenants. GitHub Copilot uses Gemini 2.0 Flash hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Claude 3.5 Sonnet is hosted on Amazon Web Services and so when you're using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, prompts and metadata are sent to Amazon's Bedrock service. When faced with options, I like asking all my AI assistants what they think. I liked the answer from Gemini. I added additional points from my own reading of the GitHub Copilot documentation & the answers from other AI assistants to come up with this analysis breakdown: 1. GPT 4o (...

Back in 2012, I was planning to build a location-aware app that would tell me about interesting sights & news-worthy facts about places that fall in the way of a train journey. I discovered that Web Dev guru Chris Heilmann ( @codepo8 ) had built a nifty app on a similar theme and shared the JavaScript code under the BSD license.  Things Around You used the browser's geolocation feature to find Wikipedia articles on nearby landmarks via the GeoNames API & list them with a brief description. For a Windows 8 app hackathon, I utilized the Geolocation detection idea to build a little app that I called GeoBuzz & posted it on the Windows 8 App Store. It's been on the back of my mind to extend it with more features. Now that GitHub Copilot is here, there was no need to procrastinate. I had a friendly chat with GitHub Copilot ( Gemini Flash model ). In under an hour, I customized @codepo8's original sample to include a map directly on the web page instead of linking t...

There is an exciting 4-Week Course on GitHub Community to help developers master GitHub Copilot & prepare for the GitHub Copilot Certification Exam . The threads contain a very useful curation of study material spanning the 7 Domains that will be covered in the exam & a knowledge check with practice questions for each of the 4 weeks. Click on the links below corresponding to the week numbers for the material. I plan to compile the reasoning for the answers to the practice questions here so that the notes can be quick reference for the exam & later - Week 1 GitHub Copilot is trained on publicly available open-source repositories and large proprietary datasets curated by GitHub. It does not use private repositories of individual users. Documentation and Stack Overflow discussions are not primary data sources for Copilot. GitHub Copilot enhance a developer's productivity during pair programming by providing inline code suggestions based on context Key ethical consideratio...