CodeSherlock.AI Extension for Visual Studio Code

Don't Just Write Code, Write Superior Code

CodeSherlock is an AI-powered code analysis and improvement tool designed to enhance your coding experience within Visual Studio Code. This extension brings the power of AI-driven code analysis directly into your development environment, offering real-time insights and actionable recommendations to elevate your code quality.

Why CodeSherlock?

Writing high-quality, secure code is every developer's primary responsibility. Whether you're using AI-assisted tools to generate code or writing it manually, creating production-ready code that stands the test of time is no trivial task—even for AI-powered code generation tools. Achieving this requires significant expertise, experience, and time. Moreover, AI-assisted tools during code generation often do not consider various quality metrics for a given use case. Existing static code analysis tools are mostly server based which require configuartion lacking an easy to use interface. There is a need for a static code analysis tool which empowers a developer to write good code with least effort. Enter CodeSherlock.

Benefits

• Instant Analysis: Analyze a code file with just a few clicks with a easy to use, intuitive user interface in any programming language.
• No SetUp Required: No Setup or Configuration is required unlike many other Static Analysis Tools.
• Real-Time Feedback: Receive instant feedback on code quality within VSCode on given quality factor and act immediately.
• Improve as you write code: Proactively write high-quality code during development as you go, before it reaches code review or deployment pipelines.
• Time Savings: Reduce time spent on manual code reviews.
• Reduce Technical Debt: Gain long-term cost savings and earn customer trust by introducing minimal maintainability costs.
• Keep Code Secure: Most security issues result from low-quality code; secure coding is non-negotiable.
• Learning Tool: Enhance your coding skills with AI-driven insights.

Comprehensive Quality Dimensions

• 100+ Quality Metrics: Evaluate your code against over 100 different quality dimensions. These dimensions roll up to seven well-known software quality factors, which you can choose from:

  • Maintainability
  • Security
  • Performance Efficiency
  • Reliability
  • Scalability
  • Resilience
  • Unit Testability

Benchmarks

• 50-70% Usefulness: Our extensive use of our own analysis reports shows that analysis has a rate of at least 50% useful improvement suggestions going upto 70%, this includes accuracy and relevance.
• 20-50% code improvement: Based on some of internal benchmarking work, we believe, if you analyze and improve code based on at least one to four factors from above, you can acheive anywhere from 20% to 50% improvement in code.

Security and Privacy

CodeSherlock is committed to the security of your code. Your code is encrypted end-to-end during transfer and securely processed on Microsoft Azure servers without being retained after analysis is complete. CodeSherlock does not claim ownership of your code and deletes it once processing is finished. To understand further how we ensure code security and privacy please read our full Security and Privacy page here. For any further questions regarding security, feel free to reach out to us at support@codesherlock.ai.

Recommended Workflow

We recommend an "improve code as you go" approach, which is the most cost-effective and efficient method for writing high-quality code. This approach involves developing code incrementally—from partial implementations to completion—while continuously analyzing and enhancing it. By doing so, you ensure that the final product meets critical quality characteristics and achieves a superior standard.

• For a well rounded code enhancement, we suggest run at least four factors to run analysis on, preferably Maintainability, Security, Performance Efficiency and Reliability. These are ISO 5055 recommended quality factors.
• For efficiency focus on Critical and High severity issues. First, implement the solutions easy to implement and then move on to solutions which may need higher refactoring. This will give you quick wins.
• Not every solution needs to be implemented. However spending upfront time in improving code can benefit in the longer run significantly in multitudes of ways. So take some time in understanding the code analysis report.

How It Works

1. Install the Extension: Add CodeSherlock extension to your VS Code environment from the Marketplace.
2. Activate Analysis: Click the CodeSherlock icon to start analysis.
3. Login or SignUp: Login in VS Code or first Sign Up at CodeSherlock website
4. Review Insights: Follow help to run an Analysis.
5. Apply Improvements: Implement suggested changes directly or use them as learning opportunities.
6. Continuous Improvement: Regularly analyze your code to maintain high-quality standards.