VSCode Extenstion and Rise of AI
How we made our first ever AI product and released it for free.
At the end of 2022, a company from US shocked the world. Its OpenAI, a company that just made Machine Learning and Deep Learning tech available for all public and let everyone take use and think outside the box and build stuffs with it.
I got my hands on the API from OpenAI that was offering anyone to think, perform and implement softwares like a big tech corp.
Best usecase to implement ?
Thinking and brainstorming about an usecase that can help someone, and then I thought about our very own problem of teaching and documenting codebases to other developers.
And thats how Describe AI was concieved.
What’s Describe AI
Its a free plugin that is available on the VS Code Extenstion markeplace that enables anyone to copy any piece of code and then right click, and then click on Explain with Descibe AI.
We released it very quick without thinking about monetization or any revenue stream, and within a week we got around 500+ installs without any marketing or sharing.
It was suppose to be an internal tool for testing and understanding the OpenAI capabiltiies but it quickly got the traction. We uderstood that this is a long run and we wont be able to fulfil big requests as the LLM model at that time as not able to explain long chunks of code or could help fix issues.
Addressing the elephant
We understood that this wont work with bigger projects and the scale is not on our hands. The APIs are not reliable and cant be tweaked according to our taste. And playing around with prompts backfired most of the times.
After running it for couple of months, we did the obvious thing.
EOL
We made the project marked with End Of Life, with the feedback that we can revive the project in future when the cost of running the model has been normalised and LLMs are evolved on running on large projects without writing garbage code or explaining unicorn stuffs to junior engineers.
Final Thoughts
The project was fun and while it worked, it created answers out of thin air with such confidence that even some senior devs will refrain from. And most of which is a lie. We gathered some useful feedback on this small project and learned a lot.
Till next time, Happy Coding :)