To repeat
Today Replit announced Ghostwriter, an AI-powered programming assistant that can make suggestions to make coding easier. It works within Replit’s online development environment and resembles GitHub Copilot’s ability to recognize and compile code in various programming languages to speed up the development process.
According to Replit, Ghostwriter works using a large language model trained on millions of lines of publicly available code. With this data baked in, Ghostwriter can make suggestions based on what you’ve already typed while programming in Replit’s IDE. When you see a suggestion you like, you can “autocomplete” the code by pressing the Tab key.
Replit says Ghostwriter performs best with JavaScript and Python, but supports 16 languages, including C, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby. It also supports HTML and CSS for web development and SQL for database queries.
Ghostwriter contains four main components: complete code (which analyzes what you have written and propose continuations), generates code (which creates new code based on your suggestions), transforms code (which helps you restructure or modernize code to conform to standards). comply), and Explain Code (which analyzes existing code and explains its function using natural language).
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When using Ghostwriter to autocomplete “a console-based snake game”, it quickly got stuck in a weird loop of variables.
Ars Technica
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Ghostwriter’s “Generate Code” feature for a “snake game” generated code that wouldn’t work without support.
Ars Technica
From our casual experiments with Replit’s IDE (running with a regular account we registered), we found that Ghostwriter performed the tasks promised in the marketing copy, albeit not flawlessly. In a few cases, the autocomplete suggestions got stuck in a repeating loop or produced code that still needed extensive programming knowledge to integrate into a project. Replit will likely refine Ghostwriter’s capabilities over time.
When evaluating Ghostwriter, we couldn’t help but notice similarities with GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant from Microsoft, and OpenAI that has been publicly available since July. Like Ghostwriter, Copilot suggests code that is auto-complete with the press of the Tab key, provides natural language explanations, and translates code.
For now, Ghostwriter is not a substitute for raw programming chops. It can instead be thought of as an addition to existing knowledge, or as an automated assistant that can reduce the amount of time you spend on sites like Stack Overflow while asking for help or studying code samples.
Replit makes its online IDE available in a variety of plans that range from free to $7 per month, depending on how you want to use it. In addition, Ghostwriter is a subscription service that costs $10 (or 1,000 cycles) per month. Cycles are virtual tokens that represent computing power on Replit’s cloud servers. Ghostwriter is available through Replit’s website.
