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Maximizing Productivity: How Pieces Became an Essential Tool in My DevOps Toolkit

Introduction

In the world of software development and engineering, Imagine using a tool that easily fits into your workflow, helping you manage code snippets, organize and share all your work materials. Meet Pieces for Developers, an advanced productivity tool made especially for developers and technical teams.

As a DevOps Engineer of 2 years who has helped different IT brands streamline their software development lifecycle, my day-to-day tasks revolve around automating infrastructure, managing CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring smooth deployment processes. I primarily work on a Mac and frequently use tools like Chrome, Visual Studio Code, GitHub Desktop, Slack, and PyCharm to streamline my workflow.

Before discovering Pieces, keeping track of work materials and code snippets was a constant struggle. I used a mix of note-taking apps, bookmarks, and text files scattered across different locations. This approach made it challenging to find and manage resources effectively.

My journey with Pieces began when I was seeking a solution to consolidate my scattered resources into a single, user-friendly platform. This potential solution was exactly what I needed to address the organizational chaos that had been hindering my productivity. My primary goal in exploring Pieces was to enhance the organization of my materials, improve access to saved resources, and ultimately boost my productivity, which it has and increased my productivity level up by a whooping 40%.

Pieces for Developers is not just another tool—it's a game-changer, with its unique feature set, Pieces empowers you to improve collaboration and streamline your productivity like never before. It ensures that everything you need—whether it be code samples, documentation, links, or notes—is always properly organized and at your fingertips. This level of organization and accessibility is what sets Pieces apart, making it a tool that genuinely enhances your work experience.

The Good. The Awesome!

Pieces enhances your productivity across all platforms, VSCode, IntelliJ, and Chrome, by providing real-time, context-aware support tailored to your workflow.

Pieces has many innovative tools that have greatly improved my workflow and productivity. Here are the aspects that impressed me the most and show the true potential of this platform:

Personalized Link Sharing

Pieces allow users to create unique, shareable links for their saved materials, such as code snippets, documentation, links, and notes. This feature makes it easy to share specific resources with colleagues, or anyone else involved in a project, ensuring that everyone has access to the right information at the right time.

Benefits

Seamless Sharing
Personalized link sharing makes it easy to share important resources. Whether it's a snippet of code, a troubleshooting guide, or project documentation, you can quickly generate a shareable link with just a few clicks.

Pieces Link sharing

Picies link

Live Context
The Live Context feature in the Pieces Copilot is transforming the way developers interact with their code. By offering context-aware and real-time insights, it enhances productivity and streamlines the coding process. Here are some perfect use cases that Pieces Live Context helped me with:

Our services were experiencing periodic failures. The logs didn't provide much detail, making it difficult to identify the root cause. I used the Live Context feature, which brought up related error logs and snippets from previous instances of similar issues. It offered suggestions based on the context and troubleshooting steps.

Pieces Live context

Also, While working on a project, I had to use a third-party package with complex documentation. I used the Live Context feature in Pieces to condense the relevant parts of the documentation efficiently. Pieces Copilot provided snippets, summaries, and examples related to the code I was working on.

Live context proof

Live Context excels at understanding your work process. Whether you prefer working in a specific environment. Pieces Copilot adapts to your needs. It seamlessly integrates into your workspace, making it feel like a natural extension of your coding toolkit.

Benefits

Support
Pieces Copilot goes beyond generic support. It understands where you work, how you work, and when you work. This feature ensures that the assistance you receive is always relevant and timely. Whether you're debugging, writing new code, or reviewing existing code, Live Context provides the exact support you need at that moment by being aware of your actual work-in-progress.

Recall
Live Context also enhances your ability to recall important information and communicate effectively. It keeps track of your coding history and Context, allowing you to revisit previous work or share insights with your team easily. This makes collaboration smoother and more efficient.

Recall when I had a call with Tsavo

You can see that, it could also recall when I had a meeting with Tsavo.

Efficiency Boost
By delivering real-time, relevant information, Live Context saves you the time and effort of manual searches, allowing you to focus more on coding and less on finding solutions.

To enable the Live context feature you must have the Workstream Pattern Engine enabled, and the Live Context toggled on as shown in the image below:

Enabling Live context

Pieces Live Context makes coding more intuitive and efficient by providing real-time,
context-aware support tailored to your unique work style.

Saved Materials
Ever thought of having an archive for all your work resources? Pieces Saved Materials is the one for you. This innovative feature offers a smart, organized, and accessible way to store and retrieve your resources.
Gone are the days when you have to surf through your bookmarks or note-taking app to search for a piece of code. With Saved Materials, everything is just a few clicks away. This feature is designed for quick and efficient retrieval, making your workflow more productive.

Saved Materials integrates seamlessly with your development environment, whether you're using VSCode, IntelliJ, or a web-based platform through the Chrome extension. You can save and access code snippets throughout all of your tools. This ensures that your saved resources are always at your fingertips, no matter where you're working.

Using PyCharm

Using PyCharm

Using Chrome extension

Using Chrome extension

Using VS Code

Using VS Code

Copilot Chats
Even without the Live Context feature, the Pieces Copilot is a generally helpful assistant where you can simply type in a prompt to ask questions, and the AI responds, providing the information or assistance needed.

Copilot Chats

You also have the power to pick any Language model of your choice while using the Pieces Copilot, with both cloud and on-device options.

Language model Options

Global Search
The Global Search is a power tool in Pieces which is designed to streamline workflow by making it easier to locate code snippets and other resources. This simply means that you can find exactly what you need without having to browse through multiple files or folders.

Global search

Final Thoughts: Wrapping things Up!

Overall Impression

Pieces has proven to be a valuable tool for managing workstream materials and increasing productivity. With its mind blowing features and impressive features such as Saved Materials to organize code snippets, the intelligent Copilot Chat, and Global Search for finding resources quickly, Pieces offers a seamless and productive user experience. Overall, Pieces is essential for developers looking to improve their workflow and coding efficiency.

Potential of Pieces

Pieces has great potential for growth as it continues to improve. It currently has many features that help developers work more efficiently. With ongoing updates and improvements, Pieces is set to become an essential tool in the tech ecosystem. As it adds more advanced features and improves its existing capabilities, it could significantly change how developers work and collaborate, making it a key resource in the industry.

One of the features I’d really want Pieces to improve in would be a collaborative chat feature for code snippets. This would let users discuss specific code in more detail, share insights, and ensure that the code follows best practices. Each snippet having its own chat space would be incredibly useful for collaborative review and continuous learning. This would make Pieces not just a tool for saving and organizing code but also for fostering communication and improvement among developers

Recommending Pieces

I highly recommend Pieces to fellow engineers as a great tool for organizing code snippets and workflow materials. It helps you stay organized, increases productivity, and provides context-aware insights and real-time support. Pieces is essential, efficient, and user-friendly, making it a must-have resource for developers looking to optimize their workflow and productivity.

Say goodbye to scattered resources and frustrating collaboration. Embrace the future of productivity with Pieces, where every aspect of your work is optimized for success.

Top comments (2)

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whimsicalbison profile image
Jack

Thanks for writing this article; I enjoyed it!

I typically keep all my notes and code snippets in a private GitLab repository, which I have checked out on all my personal and work computers. This solution has been working well for me, but I was wondering if there might be a better option. Pieces Saved Materials seemed interesting, but I’m unsure if it’s worth switching from my current setup.

When you share a link, it seems like it’s not editable and just creates a GitHub Gist for you. Is that correct?

Was also wondering if there was a web app in addition to the browser plugins to make it accessible without having to download the desktop app.

I’m not too interested in Live Context, mostly because it seems pretty invasive. However, it’s cool that you can use an on-device model, which alleviates some of these concerns.

I was also concerned about the cost. It seems like it’s currently free (with paid plans planned) according to this article, so I might as well give it a try.

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jimbobbennett profile image
Jim Bennett

Disclaimer - I work for them, head of developer advocacy, but wouldn't be working there if I didn't think the product was awesome!

Pieces is definitely worth checking out, literally invented to solve this problem. Having an AI augment the saved code is pretty neat - makes searching easier with automatically tagged snippets, if you save code from a GitHub repo you get the contributors to that code, stuff like that. Finding things when you remember the what not the actual code is nice. It also integrates across all the tools - so saving a snippet in Chrome, then accessing it inside VS Code for example, one click to add to your current file. No need to switch back and forth to a snippet repository.

By editable, I assume you mean collaborating on a snippet, so you share it, someone else edits it, and you get the edits? We don't have that at the moment, but are looking at adding team capabilities in the future which will support this use case. Would love to understand more about your use case - if you are up for sharing can you email me? Jim at pieces.app.

You do need to download the desktop app at the moment - this contains all the core power, with a lot happening offline. We call this Pieces OS and connects the desktop app, IDE extension, browser extensions etc. Again, a cloud version is something we are considering in the future.

The live context processing is all offline for example, keeping everything private, and we only send any of that offline if it's relevant context for a query using a cloud LLM. You can just use a local LLM for everything if you want! May not be as good results, but totally air gapped and the SLMs (small language models that run offline) are getting better all the time. I totally understand your concerns about it being invasive, which is why it is configurable so you can turn it off if it's not useful to you. We have a load of ML models to ensure we are not accessing passwords, API keys, and private things like that.

As you mention it is free to use so give it a go! We will be having paid plans at some point - speaking as someone who likes getting paid and has an expensive Lego habit 😁. Plan is to always have a free version, but more soon on the paid capabilities.

Feel free to reach out if you have more questions. One great place to start is our Discord - discord.gg/getpieces. Lots of folks on there to answer your questions.