When you’re a computer science student, it’s hard to balance your ridiculous course load, eat three meals a day, and get 7-8 hours of sleep. Every day is a struggle as you try to maximize your productivity and retain some semblance of sanity. That’s why it’s so important to find tools like Pieces that can help you cut down on wasted time and let you focus on the things that are important to you. Read on to see how Pieces for Developers does this and let me convince you that it is the right choice for you.
About Pieces
A lot of AI tools try to sell users on their technology rather than their functionality, but Pieces is different. They are a user-first product where every feature is designed to maximize the user experience. It’s easy to see how much the team cares about the product and their passion has created one of the best productivity tools on the market.
Main Features
- Quick and easy saving feature for code snippets
- Copilot Chats where you can ask technical questions and generate code using the latest cloud LLMs or even local AI models
- A cutting-edge Workstream Pattern Engine that can save and remember all your workflow activity, stored entirely on your device.
Privacy
Pieces is tailored for developers, some of the most privacy-conscious people in the world, and as a result, data security is a top priority for the Pieces team. Here are some ways they ensure your protection:
- Everything is stored locally. Unless you opt to backup your data, Pieces will not send any of your possibly sensitive code to the cloud.
- Local AI Models. The ML models used to process snippets and screenshots are completely local and shipped with Pieces itself. You can also download local LLMs for the copilot rather than use cloud LLMs so that none of your data can be used to train anyone else’s models.
- Pieces is SOC 2 Compliant! If you aren’t familiar with System and Organization Controls 2, it’s an industry standard for data security that shows that a company is actively engaged in protecting its users’ information. This benchmark is important to let you know that Pieces cares about your privacy!
Learn more about how Pieces protects your data.
It’s Free
What more is there to say?
Save Wasted Time
Enough talk, let’s get down to business. You’re a busy person and you want to know how Pieces can actually help you.
No More Java Docs
As fun as it is to read through giant walls of text and scroll through “beautiful” web design to find that one method you were looking for, language libraries can quickly lose their charm. If you’re like me and that charm has already faded, let me introduce you to your new best friend: Pieces Copilot Chats.
Don’t you want someone to give you the exact data type you’re looking for as soon as you ask? If there is a more fulfilling friendship, I can’t think of one. All you have to do is describe your problem to the Pieces Copilot and it will give you several options of data types you can use, along with relevant methods/functions if you ask for them.
Debugging Companion
Have you ever spent hours trying to find a segmentation fault, memory leak, null pointer exception, or even why your output is backward? Ever grow more and more stressed as the clock ticks closer to midnight and you still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with your code? If the answer is no, then you’re not a computer science student.
Debugging is a vitally important part of computer science education and it takes a lot of creativity and persistence to do well, but that takes a long time to develop. In the meantime, it’s nice to have a debugging AI tool that can help you out. The Pieces Copilot is really good at sniffing out bugs and giving you good advice on quality debugging practices. While it won’t always be a magic solution, it can help you get started, which is one of the trickiest parts of the debugging process. I highly recommend using Pieces to help debug your code—it’s saved me more times than I’d like to admit.
Don’t Download Tools By Yourself
If you haven’t used your terminal to download an SDK yet, you probably won’t appreciate this quite as much. When it comes time to install Git and you don’t know what a file path is, you’ll want the copilot. It has made my life so much easier, especially with the new Live Context.
I can look over the installation docs and the copilot will generate a much better guide by combining the gathered context along with its own knowledge. It’s really useful when the docs you have available assume knowledge and skills that you don’t have since you’re still learning. Rather than go to three different websites to figure it out, Pieces Copilot acts as a single, easily accessible source.
Summarize Readings
Do you like 20-page readings? I don’t. It’s a waste of time. With Pieces Workstream Pattern Engine and Live Context, you can scroll through any textbooks or slides and have the cCopilot summarize everything you looked at. Maybe I’m boring, long-winded, and like hearing myself talk too much—you can summarize this article. Do it. It’s not perfect and you’ll likely have to prompt it several times when dealing with longer readings, but it’s far better than staring at walls of text for an hour.
Live Context is one of the craziest, coolest inventions I’ve ever seen and I am not doing it justice. If you want to learn more about it, here are some novel AI prompts to get you started.
But How Much Does It Cost?
Nothing. I already told you. Are you even paying attention??
Enhance Your Learning
Pocket Professor
Ever had a question during a lecture but were too embarrassed to ask? Your copilot doesn’t judge. See?
The copilot can provide comprehensive instruction on any coding topic you want to learn about. While it doesn’t have the same touch as a quality professor, I still use it as an extra resource and supplement. Any time I’m in class and my professor uses terms that I don’t understand, I just ask the copilot to explain it to me. It’s fast, reliable, and it saves me the embarrassment of looking stupid… I don’t, right? Look stupid?
Personalized Exercises
I often don’t get the coding practice that I want from my classes, so I have to look for ways to supplement my education with additional exercises. Sometimes I want a direct programming problem that tests if I know how to do something, and sometimes I want a more layered problem that requires creative thinking. Whatever I’m feeling, Pieces has me covered. Their copilot can generate targeted tasks that test exactly what I’m looking to practice. I’ve used this to practice writing constructors, methods, and any other specifics I need to memorize for an exam. But my professor usually has me covered with a reference sheet, so instead I use the copilot to focus on the concepts that they don’t cover so well.
Do you know what tail recursion is? Because I didn’t. I only learned that it was important because it showed up in a practice exam. Turns out, it was 15% of the entire test. If I hadn’t hammered it out for a day straight with Pieces, I would have been screwed. I’m not saying that I would have failed without Pieces, I’m not that much of a shill, but it was a very useful studying tool that made things a bit easier for me.
Proper Testing
One of the hardest but most important things to learn in computer science is how to write rigorous test cases. It might feel sacrilegious when you first try to find every way possible to break your code, but in reality, it’s the most holy art known to a developer. And to be frank, many internships and research positions will make you test programs and products, so having those skills is imperative. That’s where Pieces Copilot comes in.
I like to use the copilot to generate a list of edge cases to try. It’s fairly comprehensive and it can also provide example code that I will use and expound upon. With more complicated programs, the copilot doesn’t capture every possible point of failure, but at the end of the day you are a student and are here to learn - what’s important is that it’s teaching you good testing practices. By showing me how I should be testing, the copilot helps me learn how to push the boundaries of my programs and be a better coder.
Cash for Comments
I know you - I am you. No matter how much your professor stresses the importance of comments, you’re going to neglect them. Pieces can comment your code for you, which is helpful when there are only five minutes before an assignment is due and you realize you forgot to put any comments at all. This won’t teach you much except what good comments look like, but it might save your grade.
It’s Easy to Get Started
It takes two minutes to install Pieces and half an hour to become an expert. How much time have you spent on YouTube today? Instagram? TikTok? You have no excuse.
Conclusion
Since Pieces is designed for students and software developers already in the industry, if it is useful to you now, imagine how helpful it will be once you graduate. More importantly, when dealing with sensitive code in your future career, you may not be able to use cloud models like Chat GPT or Gemini. Since Pieces lets you do everything locally, you can use it even when working on projects where data security is a top priority. Even if you don’t use Pieces during your career, your experience with it will help you use other AI tools in the future and you can always use it on the side for passion projects. So if you're a student studying software, give Pieces a shot. It’s worth it.
Top comments (1)
Amazing article on this gonna try it out!