Zencoder currently offers two built-in agents, for unit test generation and coding, and an interface for defining custom agents. Custom agents are essentially named, saved instruction prompts for the large language model, aimed at solving specific tasks.
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Zencoder compared to competitors
Zencoder (the company) helpfully prepared comparison charts for Zencoder (the product) and eight competitors. Not surprisingly, since I never really trust what one vendor has to say about another’s product even when they attempt to be fair and balanced, I think that all of these comparisons were designed to tout Zencoder. Some have inaccuracies that understate the rival’s capabilities, and several seem to be about older, less capable versions of the competition. For example, the Copilot side of the screenshot below is newer than the version Zencoder used to write its comparison.
Zencoder omitted Solver from their comparisons. Given how new Solver is, that’s understandable. Nevertheless, Solver is even more promising than Zencoder, since it not only reads whole repositories, it can modify whole repos. You can read my review of Solver here.
At the left, you can see Zencoder’s explanation of a C++ sorting function; at the right, you can see GitHub Copilot’s explanation of the same code using the o1-preview model. At the top you can see the Zencoder functions available in VS Code in the Zencoder v0.5.1 plugin. Overall, I like the explanation on the right better, but I’m partial to a documentation style that mixes words and code.
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An ambitious attempt
Zencoder is, in my opinion, an ambitious attempt to enter the code generation and repair market, but it’s still wet behind the ears. Using a pipeline with error correction to avoid hallucinations, instead of straight code generation with an LLM, sounds promising, but it isn’t ipso facto better than a model that generates correct code right out of the box and suppresses hallucinations internally. Similarly, “grokking” whole repositories should provide better context than just looking at whatever pages are open in the editor, but the time it takes to digest large repos is significant, and it looks like Zencoder redoes that process from scratch whenever you refresh the repo.
