.NETpad 2025: With a Little Help From My (AI) Friends (Premium)

When I began last year's .NETpad modernization project, I intended to wrap-up the work with the help of GitHub Copilot or a similar AI. But because I took on too much work, I ended up splitting this modernization effort in two, and I'm now continuing with the second phase, in which I'll add support for multiple tabs and documents, plus other new features. That said, I've never stopped thinking about how I might use AI to improve .NETpad. Indeed, I've been using AI in small ways for months.

The first big push was obvious enough: In December, Microsoft created a free tier of GitHub Copilot that gives everyone 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. I was already signing in to Visual Studio with my GitHub account, so all I had to do was enable GitHub Copilot in that app, and now I get inline code corrections and help using this incredible service.

Since then, I've also experimented with Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT, and Anthropic Claude by asking each, in turn, to solve some specific issue I've run into with the app, or to confirm a solution I came up with independently. I haven't really done much by way of head-to-head comparisons. Instead, I've just used one or the other to see whether AI could get me over some hump.

Much more recently, I used the Cursor AI code editor that Brad mentioned on First Ring Daily this past week to open the GitHub repository for the public version of .NETpad, which is the version I published at the end of last year. (The non-tabs-based version.) There, my intention was to start small, select a single method, and ask it whether it could be written more efficiently. But Cursor instead examined the entire project and issued a sweeping set of recommendations across the full source code of the app.

Each of these has been incredibly helpful. And it's quite clear that AI can and will play a critical role in improving the quality of the code I write. This is especially important because, again, I'm not a professional developer and the code for this new tabs-based version of .NETpad is quite complex. I'm hitting the limits of my capabilities here (though I'm proud to say I did figure out the basics of managing multiple tabs and documents on my own, albeit in my own unsophisticated or non-professional way).

I now wish I hadn't waited so long. Here are a few quick examples of why AI is such a game-changer for developers.
Code completion
This feels a bit weird to write, but the code completion capabilities that GitHub Copilot delivers in Visual Studio are so good it can feel like magic. Indeed, this has caused me to laugh out loud multiple times. It's like the AI is reading my mind. In some cases, I will write a comment and then start to write the code to implement that thing, and it just fills it all in, sometimes over multiple lines of code in a lengthy code block. That bit is somewhat understandable, given that my comment might be seen as a prompt of sorts.

There are also instances in which...