aide

'aide' is your coding conscience, poking you to understand every line and become a better developer, not just a 'vibe-coder'.

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Inspiration

In the fast-paced world of coding, many beginners and even new employees fall into the habit of copy-pasting code without truly understanding it. This slows down both learning and onboarding, leading to surface-level knowledge and inefficiency. We were inspired to create aide as a tool to transform copy-pasting into an opportunity for active learning and helping users understand code more deeply and efficiently.

What it does

aide is an AI-Powered VS Code and Chrome extension that:

  1. Detects when code is pasted into your editor.
  2. Prompts users with an optional quiz to test their understanding.
  3. Provides AI-generated questions and improvement suggestions.
  4. Supports onboarding by helping interns and employees understand complex company codebases.

How we built it

We used agentic tools to structure the project and figure out the logic for features we couldn't figure out ourselves. This ties into our core mission, which wasn't to de-incentivize "vibe-coding" but to embrace it while also actively learning. We actually used our own extension to learn parts of our code that were particularly hard to understand. We used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, which weren't too difficult to learn for the front-end of our project. The back-end was where we needed the most help. We used Node.js and the VS Code API, which were technologies we were completely unaware of. This is where we believe "vibe-coding" shines, as it removes the barrier to entry to creating complex projects, with the sole con of not actually learning anything — the very con we tackled with our project.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Designing detection logics that works across multiple programming languages.
  2. Creating meaningful questions that can be both beginner-friendly and enterprise level use cases.
  3. Debugging and API key usage and generation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a very decent MVP for the time we had to work on it. We went out of our comfort zones and worked with technologies we weren't comfortable with. We also had fun in the process, which is the most important thing we could do here.

What we learned

  1. Using VS Code extension API and Chrome extension API for commands, storage, and UI rendering.
  2. Building user-friendly interfaces for displaying analysis and quizzes of code.
  3. Integrating extensions into browsers and IDEs.
  4. Optimizing frontend and backend systems for a robust product.

What's next for aide

  1. Expanding AI analysis to also understand the surrounding codebase.
  2. Gamification: XP, provide badges and leaderboards to engage learning.
  3. Scaling features for large organizations for team-based learning modules.
  4. Working with hackathons and CS classes.

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