Basic gets a boost: Announcing major upgrades to our free AI code assistant

In a world filled with rising costs, big tech price hikes, and “shrinkflation,” it’s great when you get more value for your money. It’s even better when you get more for free. 

With this in mind, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve made significant additions to our free AI code assistant, Tabnine Basic, including access to more AI agents, advanced personalization features, and the ability to use Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the basis for Tabnine’s code generation and validation features.

At Tabnine, we remain dedicated to providing the best available AI software development platform for professional developers. Tabnine Basic is our way of providing those same capabilities to anyone working on software, anywhere in the world, even if they can’t afford the service.

Access to state-of-the-art LLMs

All Tabnine Basic users have access to Tabnine’s AI code assistant chat agent, which offers help with various software development tasks using natural language. With this latest release, you now also have access to the most advanced AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI through our switchable models capability, allowing you to choose the best LLM for your use case in real time. In addition to the Tabnine and Mistral models already available, you can now choose from Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o. 

Both in our testing and based on feedback from Tabnine’s users, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet is proving to be the most powerful model for software development use cases. Tabnine tracks “acceptance rate” — the percentage of suggestions that the AI generates that a user accepts (by inserting or giving a “thumbs up” in our UI) — by users who opt-in to provide product improvement feedback. In this real-world usage, Claude 3.5’s acceptance rate is notably higher than all other models in use, including previous leaders GPT-4o and Codestral. 

There’s only one caveat: the Tabnine Basic plan has daily usage limits on the Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o models to contain our out-of-pocket costs. When you hit these limits, you can either switch to the Tabnine Protected 2 or Mistral models or wait until the next day for the quota to reset. These limitations are only for chat interactions and inline actions, and don’t affect our advanced AI code completions (Our AI code completions use Tabnine’s proprietary model, not Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o) . Our paid plans don’t have any usage restrictions.

More personalized AI responses

In generative AI, context is everything. Without context, LLMs will typically generate responses that are textbook accurate, but generic and thus less aligned to what your engineering team finds acceptable. With context, an AI code assistant will make recommendations that consider your team’s patterns and will more often do better with reuse. To achieve this, Tabnine leverages locally available code and data in your IDE as context to offer more tailored responses, including variable types used near the completion point in the code, comments you’ve added, open files you’ve interacted with, imported packages and libraries, open projects, and many more sources as shown here. 

Tabnine’s personalized AI recommendations based on awareness of a developer’s IDE are accepted 40% more often than AI suggestions generated without that context, and we’re glad to be able to bring these capabilities to Tabnine’s free plan users. 

Availability of new AI agents

In addition to the Code Explain and Onboarding Agent, Documentation Agent, and Code Fix Agent, our free users also now have access to our powerful Test Agent, which generates comprehensive test plans with detailed test cases for functions and methods. You can expand any test case to review its code and refine the test to meet your specific needs. The agent learns from other tests in your codebase and uses existing standards and frameworks. 

What’s included in the Tabnine Basic plan

Check out the table to learn about the capabilities available on Tabnine’s Basic plan. To unlock all these capabilities, you need to register for Tabnine and be logged in. Registering for Tabnine involves creating an account and providing us your email address — no credit card is required. Registration is necessary to protect from abuse of the platform, and we remain committed to your privacy and our zero data retention approach. 

If you’re not ready to register, don’t worry: Tabnine Basic will still provide the best-in-class AI code completion and inline code generation that the company pioneered.

How to get started with Tabnine Basic

If you’re an existing Tabnine Basic plan user, we encourage you to register (if you haven’t already) and update your Tabnine plugin to take advantage of the latest capabilities. Not a user yet? Download and install the Tabnine plugin, and register for Tabnine to get started. Please visit our Plans and Pricing page to learn about all the plans we offer.