January 13, 2026
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
There has been an explosion of generative AI programming tools hitting the market over the past three years, many of which are free to use.
These tools have quickly shown that they can fit neatly into software developers’ workflows and provide an instant productivity boost. They’ve very quickly gone from interesting novelty to essential tool.
These tools and agents – which leverage large language models (LLMs) and other kinds of AI models to understand language, imagery, and code – can modify, test, review, and ship code across whole repositories, as well as explain what’s going on in a codebase.
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January 13, 2026
