Features
It has many features, and covering all of them won’t be possible. However, I will list some of the possibilities with Pieces, and you can figure out more from the docs later. Some of the fantastic features are the following:
- Pieces Copilot - helps you generate contextualized code snippets and ask questions of entire repositories.
- Centralized repository - store code snippets, screenshots, and other useful materials from throughout your workflow to reuse later on
- Automatic Enrichments - everything you save to Pieces is given a title, description, related links, and other helpful context/metadata
- One-link sharing - generate snippets sharing links for seamless collaboration
- Screenshots - it can extract code from screenshots using OCR and edge ML models that auto-correct any defects (quite useful for me)
- Many more
Getting Started
Whether you plan to use it within VS Code or in Chrome, installing Pieces OS along with the desktop application (Windows/Mac/Linux) as well as the specific IDE, browser, or collaboration tool integration (VS Code in this case) is recommended.
You can find the download links here.
Once you install the OS version, you can start using features such as copilot chat, generating descriptions, creating shareable links, etc.
For some features, you may need additional plugins, such as the
Chrome extension, to save Stack Overflow snippets.
Pieces overview - taken from pieces.app/blog
Use cases
The use cases of pieces are pretty obvious, but the most common ones are:
- Browsing - the endless searching on Stack Overflow is reduced by relying on Pieces and using the Pieces Copilot feature for help. Moreover, the valuable code snippets on Stack Overflow can be saved to Pieces.
- Content creator - for someone like me, who always likes to add examples when explaining things, Pieces are instrumental in generating models or improving my existing ones.
Conclusion
Pieces is a personalized AI assistant that helps to improve your coding efficiency. Not only developers but technical content creators can also use it to generate examples for their content.
What sets it apart from other similar tools is the integration support and flexibility. Pieces integrates with various development environments including Chrome, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains, making it an adaptable tool across different platforms. Additionally, the ability to switch between different Large Language Models offers unparalleled flexibility, allowing developers to choose the model that best suits their specific needs, even Local LLMs.