Beyond the typical IntelliSense or code completion developers have come to appreciate, earlier this year Microsoft announced IntelliCode, a set of capabilities that provide AI-assisted development. The VS Code team has now announced a new experimental extension to bring IntelliCode to TypeScript and JavaScript users.
VS Code users may install the Visual Studio IntelliCode extension via the extensions tab in VS Code. Once installed, open a source code file and IntelliCode recommendations get starred and raised to the top of the auto-completion list.
IntelliCode changes its recommendations on context and relevance. To provide these recommendations, IntelliCode leverages open source code data from GitHub. Microsoft does not collect user code unless a user opts-in to that option. Some anonymized usage and error-reporting data gets collected by the extension to improve the tool.
The extension includes support for various JavaScript libraries including React, Angular, Vue.js, Node.js, and Express. It is not clear at this time if there are other libraries or frameworks supported, or if developers can add support for a specific framework.
IntelliCode augments VS Code IntelliSense by recommending commonly used completion items which get generated by common practices learned from having IntelliCode train across thousands of real-world open source projects. The goal is to save developers time by putting the language or API choice they would most likely use at the top of the auto-completion list.
