My company is slowly but surely getting hooked on AI coding. Our management is resisting it, because we know it's self-destruction for us for a variety of reasons, but it's like a drug: lazy engineers insist on using it and they'll win out eventually because laziness is relentless.
So I've decided to preempt the inevitable and dive into this stuff, because one thing is concerning me: the lazy engineers ask Copilot to write their code for them, because it's right there, already integrated in VSCode, and it's bundled with other Microsoft services my company has unfortunately fallen pray to a few years ago when our last aging Unix engineer retired and was replaced by a MCSE monkey.
Of course, the tightly integrated ecosystem is very deliberate from Microsoft: they're creating a powerful path of least resistance for the laziness and it works.
There are two problems with Copilot:
- It's Microsoft (no need to rehash why it's generally best to stay away from Microsoft I guess)
- Microsoft is headquartered in a country that has gone rogue, adversarial, unpredictable and is getting very, VERY Nazi.
All my career, since the 90s, I've argued against using Microsoft products with all my employers, and I've always been treated as an amusing paranoid lunatic. But this time, the Nazi argument is landing: my management is genuinely concerned that the company's balls are in Microsoft's hand, and that they can be instructed by the orange madman to wreck our business - along with all the other businesses in Europe - at a moment's notice.
So I'm evaluation Claude Code an a step to at least divest away from Microsoft - still American, but fewer eggs in the same nasty basket. But ideally I'd like to evaluate a European AI company's coding assistant, so I can be in an informed and authoritative position to make a recommendation that isn't neither Microsoft nor American when the company finally decides to include AI use officially in the rule book.
Does anybody know a good AI coding assistant out of Europe I could look into? I don't mind spending money on evaluation, but if there's money to spend, I'd rather it'd be expensed on the right tool from the get-go if possible.
I have tried it multiple times for embedded coding and it has never once produced valid code. It is like tutorials giving pseudo-code (but saying it is real code). So vibe-coding seems to not work with it.
It can produce an idea that you can follow, so it is useful for exploring different methods for solving a problem, but that is its limit for me.
That said, embedded code generally has quite specific libraries, but even directing it right to the library, right to the file, I was unable to coax it into using functions or APIs that exist.
Interesting. Thanks for the feedback. I reached out to them, see if they can help me evaluate their solution in the best possible conditions.