Swimm, a player in the GenAI-powered coding assistant realm, has unveiled /ask Swimm, marking another significant stride in the race to develop AI tools that offer genuine value to users.
This latest solution, blending AI-powered chat with human input, aims to cater to the evolving needs of enterprise software development teams, further intensifying the competition following the late 2022 boom in AI tech development.
In a landscape where tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon vie to create cutting-edge code assistance tools, /ask Swimm distinguishes itself by addressing the core need for context.
AI /ask Swimm exceeds the expectations of software developers
Swimm’s /ask Swimm is a testament to the industry’s commitment to delivering tools that not only meet but exceed the evolving expectations of software developers in a post-2022 AI tech boom era.
The relentless pursuit of software developers to accelerate code delivery frequently encounters roadblocks, primarily stemming from insufficient code documentation hygiene and a constrained understanding of contextualized code.
A survey by Swimm underscores the crucial role of code documentation, with 73% of developers deeming it essential for organizational productivity. However, 37% of respondents acknowledged spending substantial time—five or more hours weekly—scouring for information to comprehend code or address related questions.
This stark reality highlights the persistent gap between the demand for effective code understanding and the existing toolset, creating a dynamic and competitive landscape for forward-thinking solutions.
At the forefront of this landscape, /ask Swimm emerges as an AI-powered coding assistant designed to introduce a nuanced contextual understanding of code, promising to significantly enhance productivity across the entire development lifecycle.
The personalized chat empowers developers to address questions about documentation, code, files, repositories, and entire software ecosystems.
Going beyond the limitations of AI
Going beyond the code itself, /ask Swimm incorporates contextual factors such as business decisions, product design considerations, and the rationale behind unexplored paths.
The tool not only captures but also continually updates code-related knowledge, evolving over time through user feedback and generated documents.
Oren Toledano, CEO, and Co-founder at Swimm, underscored the critical importance of context in code understanding, stating, “No matter how good they are, a tool doesn’t know what it doesn’t know because it’s lacking the relevant context. To provide the most complete picture to engineers, we’ve developed /ask Swimm, which is the logical next step in the evolution of code understanding.”
Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners, further emphasized the significance of a context-based approach to code assistance.
“If large language models can suggest helpful code, shouldn’t Swimm be able to leverage LLMs to suggest helpful code documentation? Shouldn’t the code documentation captured in Swimm be able to improve future code suggestions and help answer software engineering questions about legacy code? Swimm is doing just that,” he said. “They’ve taken the historically manual and outdated process of code documentation and completely reimagined it using AI.”
