Introducing Duet AI for Developers: The Next Frontier in AI-Driven Developer Productivity

Last week, we announced the private preview of Duet AI for Google Cloud, an always-on AI collaboration tool that uses generative AI to empower developers and cloud users. This article will introduce Duet AI for developers in detail, showing how Duet AI can help developers provide real-time code suggestions, chat assistance, and enterprise-level customization functions. You can sign up to be on the waiting list for the Google Cloud AI Trusted Test Program here.

We believe that addressing these use cases with large language models (LLMs) will lead to major productivity leaps in enterprise development. Duet AI uses Codey, a family of code models built on top of PaLM 2.

Developers continue to seek ways to increase productivity, and over the past few decades, these efforts have resulted in huge leaps in productivity due to technological change. From advanced debuggers and online developer communities, to modern IDEs/notebooks and cloud computing, each advance has brought huge productivity changes. Despite these improvements, developers still face many challenges, some of which are unique to cloud development:

• When integrating a new tool or service, there are headaches caused by interrupting context switching and friction.
• Too much time is spent on repetitive tasks.
• It takes time to understand a new codebase or project.
• When dealing with large codebases or complex APIs, there is a huge cognitive load.

Duet AI's focus for developers focuses on the challenges and tasks in the development lifecycle:

Code/boilerplate generation - Developers can describe what they want to accomplish as annotations or function names, such as creating a Cloud Pub/Sub topic. Duet AI will generate a reference implementation ready for review and modification, so developers don't need to spend time reading multiple documentation pages.

Code Generation within Cloud Workstations

Inline Code Completion — To reduce time spent on repetitive tasks and reduce the cognitive load on tasks like writing repetitive code or retrieving variable names, Duet AI provides intelligent context-aware code completion to help reduce coding time and improve coding quality.

Enterprise-level customization — Organizations often have large code bases and specific recommended frameworks and best practices that may not be best supported by generic code assistance solutions. With Vertex AI, developers will be able to tune and customize the underlying model and connect it into the Duet AI experience, enabling assistance optimized to an organization's needs.

Code Interpretation — Developers spend a lot of time and effort reading and understanding code written by colleagues or external contributors. To help assist with this process, Duet AI offers an "Explain This Code" option that appears whenever a developer selects their code, enabling them to understand, map, and navigate unfamiliar codebases more quickly.

Duet is explaining the logic of the GO file

Code security protection - Through Source Protect, the code generated by Duet AI can also be scanned for vulnerability dependencies, helping to detect known public vulnerabilities affecting the code, and provide suggested fixes when there are fixes available, providing additional security .

Real-time vulnerability detection

By leveraging the AI-powered developer assistance capabilities offered by Duet AI for developers, businesses can unlock unprecedented productivity and efficiency in software development, ushering in a new era of innovation and growth.

These early features of Duet AI for Google Cloud will be available to a small number of users, and access will expand soon. Register here to join Google Cloud's AI Trusted Test Program.