Seven engineering decisions that shaped our AI code assistant

I've spent the last few months building an AI-powered code assistant, and let me tell you—it's been one of the most exciting projects I've worked on. The landscape of developer tools has changed dramatically in recent years, and creating something that genuinely helps programmers write better code faster feels like contributing to something meaningful. If you're thinking about building your own code assistant, I want to share what I've learned along the way.

The idea started simply enough. I was tired of constantly context-switching between my IDE, documentation sites, and Stack Overflow. I wanted something that could understand what I was trying to do and offer relevant suggestions without me having to leave my development environment. Turns out, I wasn't alone in this frustration.