AI Agents for Application Developers are intelligent, autonomous software systems designed to assist developers throughout the application development lifecycle. Powered by advanced AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs), these agents can interpret natural language instructions, plan and execute multi-step tasks, and interact with various development tools, platforms, and environments. Their capabilities extend beyond simple code suggestions to include activities like setting up infrastructure, configuring services, debugging applications, generating documentation, and optimizing performance—all with minimal human intervention. These agents are context-aware, goal-driven, and capable of adapting to evolving project requirements, making them valuable collaborators in modern software engineering.
Gartner defines AI code assistants as tools that assist in generating and analyzing software code and configuration. The assistants use foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) that have been optionally fine-tuned for code, or program-understanding technologies, or a combination of both. Software developers prompt the code assistants to generate, analyze, debug, fix, and refactor code, to create documentation, and to translate code between languages. Code assistants integrate into developer tools like code editors, command-line terminals and chat interfaces. Some can be customized to an organization’s specific codebase and documentation. AI code assistants can enhance a software developer’s experience by boosting efficiency, accelerating application development, minimizing cognitive overload, amplifying problem-solving skills, accelerating learning pace, fostering creativity and maintaining state of flow.