Most AI-coding tools integrate with blink.cmp, the plugin LazyVim uses for completions and snippets, and this is the simplest way to get started with them.

Some plugins also have a “chat” feature that allows you to communicate with the AI in a more interactive way. In my experience, these features don’t work very well right now, with one exception that we will cover.

If you’ve never used AI for coding before, you may be skeptical as to whether it’s worth paying for. In fact, I use it extensively, and I’m still skeptical! Codeium is a great place to start because the free “Individual” tier is “smart enough to be useful.”

It’s also faster and more responsive, and when it comes to waiting for completion menus to pop up, inaccurate but fast is often more useful than accurate but slow.

To get started, you will need an account on codeium.com.

Enabling Codeium in LazyVim is dead simple: just open the :LazyExtras command and find coding.codeium. Hit x to install it as usual and restart Neovim.

You should be presented with a window to authenticate Codeium automatically. If not, type the command :Codeium Auth. You will see a simple menu:

Select the option most appropriate for you to open a URL in a web browser. The default will work for most people, but if you are running Neovim over SSH or in a docker container you might need to get more creative.

Once logged in, you’ll see a page with a token in it and instructions to copy it to your clipboard. Do so, then paste it in the Token box waiting in Neovim. If you’ve lost this box, you can find it again by typing :Codeium Auth and selecting “I already have a key”.

You may want to restart your editor again. Now, while you are coding, you’ll get Codeium entries in your completion menu:

As you can see by the preview to the right, the completions may be multi-line. Sometimes, they are accurate and useful. Other times, not so much. (I once tried to get ChatGPT to tell me what percentage of the time it is accurate and it flat out refused to give me a number).

As with everything AI, don’t rely on the answers, but it can save you a few keystrokes every once in a while, and that’s all any Vim user really wants in life.

At time of writing, GitHub Copilot is considered the current gold standard for AI-driven coding. From an enterprise perspective, its primary advantage is that if you already use GitHub, your security team has already vetted it. From a developer perspective, I find it a bit slow, but more accurate than other AI tools I’ve tried.

First, sign up for an account on GitHub. It’s free for 30 days so you can decide if it’s worth it before submitting an expense to your employer.

There are several different LazyVim plugins that support Copilot. The easiest is to use the :LazyExtras command and enable coding.copilot. This enables the zbirenbaum/copilot.lua plugin, which creates blink.cmp completions similar to those that the codeium plugin provides.

Similar to Codeium, type the command :Copilot auth to enable your account and follow the prompts. You’ll be given a code to type into a browser window on GitHub.

After that, you should see Copilot completions in your blink.cmp popups just like you did with Codeium. You can use both at the same time, but be aware that it’s hard on the environment and your network connection!

The advantage of TabNine is that it can run locally on your device, a very important feature for certain enterprise situations or anywhere that intellectual property matters (I wouldn’t be surprised if AI destroys the concept of intellectual property once and for all. The advantages of a hive-mind may well outweigh the long-term advantages of corporate ownership).

You can configure Tabnine in Neovim similarly to Codeium and Copilot. LazyVim ships with support to integrate TabNine with blink.cmp to get completion sources. You can enable it with the :LazyExtras command and x on the coding.tabnine line.

Restart Neovim. You’ll probably have to wait a while for the plugin to download and install TabNine, but it should all be taken care of for you. Once the plugin is installed, run :CmpTabnineHub to authenticate yourself, then restart Neovim one more time.

Now you should see TabNine completions in your list. I find they are virtually useless on the basic plan.

TabNine also has a newish official Neovim plugin named tabnine-nvim. It even has a chat mode, but this mode requires running a separate binary to show the chat window alongside your editor. This is obviously problematic if you want to use Neovim inside ssh or docker sessions, and installing it requires setting up the entire Rust and GTK toolchain, so it is beyond the scope of this book.

Cody theoretically has an advantage over some of the other AI tools because it has access to Sourcegraph’s insights into the structure of your codebase. They recently updated to Claude V3 for their chats, so conversations with it are fairly natural.

Unlike the other mentioned tools, there is currently no LazyVim Extra for Sourcegraph or Cody. Instead, you’ll need to install the sg.nvim plugin manually:

Sign up for an account over at https://sourcegraph.com/ and then run the :SourcegraphLogin command. Note that the g is not capitalized; I thought my plugin wasn’t installed correctly and spent half an hour debugging that typo.

This plugin is more than just an AI completion tool; it also gives you access to commands to browse your code using Sourcegraph. However, they depend on the Telescope picker instead of Fzf.lua. You can replace Fzf.lua with Telescope in the Lazy Extras, but I only recommend going that far if you really love Sourcegraph. The product has some pretty cool features, but those are beyond the scope of this book. You can learn more about available features by reading through :help sg.nvim.

If things aren’t working correctly, use :checkhealth sg to help understand what went wrong.

With the above configuration, blink.cmp completions should work similarly to the other tools. To interact with the Cody chat assistant, use the command :CodyAsk with a prompt. For example, select some code and type :CodyAsk what does this do?

A window pops up in front of your code that looks like a chat interface, with some keybinding tips on the right side:

Other chat commands you may want to read about in the help files include :CodyChat!, :CodyTask, :CodyToggle, :CodyExplain, and :CodyRestart.

Supermave claims to have the fastest response times of the various AI coding assistants. It has the advantage of being able to use the free plan without setting up an account, but if you sign up for a paid account, you’ll supposedly get better results.

Enabling the plugin is as easy as the other tools. Simply hit :LazyExtras, search for ai.supermaven and hit x. Restart Neovim and give it a few moments to download the Supermaven binary behind your back.

You should automatically see an activation link that looks something like this:

If you want to use the pro plan, click (if your terminal supports clicking links) or copy-paste the link to your browser and follow instructions. If you want the free version, close the popup window with :q and then enter the :SupermavenUseFree command.

Now you should see Supermaven completions in your blink.cmp popup as you type.

Supermaven doesn’t have a chat interface. There are a handful of commands for things like restarting Supermaven if you type :Supermaven<Tab>.

If you have tried the free plan and decided to upgrade to pro, you may be confused! You’ll need to use :SupermavenLogout followed by :SupermavenUsePro to get the activation link again.

ChatGPT is a good coding assistant, and there are several plugins that integrate nicely with the editor. However, none of them are available as LazyExtras. They also all require an OpenAI API key, which tends to be a lot more expensive than opening ChatGPT in the browser and asking it questions on the paid plan, then copying text over in the most awful way possible.

For the most part, I think GitHub Copilot is as smart as ChatGPT (about coding, anyway), and the CopilotChat plugin is a nice interface, so I recommend that instead.

If you want to explore integrating ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or several other AI engines into Neovim, check out the parrot.nvim plugin. Configuration is similar to the other tools above.

This chapter was all about AI. AI is a weirdly simple topic, considering the complexity it abstracts away. Under the hood, LLMs are really cool, but the interface to interacting with them is typically just a simple HTTP request to some API somewhere (an API that is so useful we collectively don’t think hard enough about how much we trust it).

Various Neovim plugins have created interfaces to these APIs. LazyVim makes it easy to integrate many of them with blink.cmp, and other services are covered with third-party plugins.

Choosing between the various options is the hard part. None of them work quite as well as I would like, and I find that the amount of time they save is about equal to the amount of time they cost when they get things wrong. I currently use Copilot because my employer pays for it, but I have disabled it before and not missed it.

Next up, we’ll discuss running debuggers from inside LazyVim.