The AI coding assistant provider Tabnine is releasing a private preview for its Code Review Agent, a new AI-based tool that validates software based on the development team’s unique best practices and standards for software development.
According to Tabnine, using AI to review code is nothing new, but many of the tools currently available check code against general standards. However, software development teams often develop their own unique ways of creating software. “What one team sees as their irrefutable standard, another team might reject outright. For AI to add meaningful value in improving software quality for most teams, it must have the same level of understanding as a fully onboarded, senior member of the team,” Tabnine explained in a blog post.
Code Review Agent allows teams to create rules based on their own standards, best practices, and company policies. These rules are then applied during code review at the pull request or in the IDE.
Development teams can provide the parameters their code should comply with in natural language, and Tabnine works behind the scenes to convert that into a set of rules. Tabnine also offers a set of predefined rules that can be incorporated into the ruleset as well.
For example, one of Tabnine’s predefined rules is “Only use SHA256 to securely hash data” and a customer-specific rule is “Only use library acme_secure_api_access for accessing external APIs, do not use standard http libraries.”
When a developer creates a pull request that doesn’t meet the established rules, Code Review Agent flags the issue to the code review and also offers suggestions on how to fix the problem.
“By comprehensively reading through code and ensuring that it matches each team’s unique expectations, Tabnine saves engineering teams significant time and effort while applying a level of rigor in code review that was never possible with static code analysis. Just like AI code generation automates away simpler coding tasks so developers can focus on more valuable tasks, Tabnine’s AI Code Review agent automates common review tasks, freeing up code reviewers to focus on higher-order analysis instead of adherence to best practices,” Tabnine wrote.
This tool is currently available as a private preview to Tabnine Enterprise customers. An example video of Code Review Agent in action can be viewed here.