Meet Alibaba’s AI coder: an automated system that can build an app ‘in minutes’

By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-10 00:23:03 | Updated at 2025-01-10 07:39:06 7 hours ago
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Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit launched a novel artificial intelligence (AI) coder that is touted as capable of building an application “in minutes”, sparking plenty of discourse among software programmers in mainland China.

The AI coder, part of Alibaba Cloud’s AI programming tool called Tongyi Lingma, can perform a set of automated tasks – from comprehending prompts, writing code and debugging software – to complete development of an app “as fast as a few minutes”, according to a company statement on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The system is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen family of large language models (LLMs) – the technology behind generative AI (GenAI) services like ChatGPT – and improves code development efficiency “by over 10 times”, the company said.

Its launch has fanned speculation among Chinese programmers that this tool can surpass those from US firms like ChatGPT creator OpenAI, as Alibaba Cloud touted its AI coder as the world’s first such system that supports both Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and JetBrains’ IDEs – two popular integrated software-development platforms used in the industry.

Shanghai-based software engineer Frank Lin said he had previously used the coding tool on ChatGPT’s website, which can handle routine coding tasks but has limited “creative abilities”.

“The Alibaba Cloud one looks stronger than the ChatGPT one by its introduction,” Lin said, adding that he would be willing to pay for the new service if it proves to be competitive.

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Alibaba Cloud is seeing growing domestic adoption of its artificial intelligence programming tool, Tongyi Lingma. Photo: Shutterstock
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