5 machine learning tools to ease software development

Most discussions of developers making use of machine learning revolve around creating AI-powered applications and the tools used to create them: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, and so on.

But there is another way machine learning is impacting software development: by way of new development tools that use machine learning techniques to make programming easier and more productive. Here are five projects three commercial, two experimental that put machine learning to work for developers within the development process.

Kite

Kite is a code completion tool, available for most major code editors, that uses machine learning techniques to fill in your code as you’re typing it.

The machine learning model used by Kite is created by taking publicly available code on GitHub, deriving an abstract syntax tree from it, and using that as a basis for the model. According to Kite, this allows auto-suggestion and auto-completion to be derived from the context and intention of the code, rather than just the text.