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How to Use Tabnine Agent

This guide walks you through using Tabnine Agent effectively, from basic interactions to advanced workflows.

Quick Start Guide

When you open Tabnine in your IDE, look up to the top of the app and select Agent.

Then, before you type into the prompt box at the bottom, select which model you want from the dropdown menu beneath the top menu.

Before you prompt, make sure to have a project folder open in your IDE. This is so that Agent has a place to save new project files. Without it, Agent won't work properly.

Prompt

Scroll down to the prompt box and describe your goal in plain language. Agent's strength is evaluating your end goal and describing what it will to do get you there.

It is a best practice to ask Agent to review its plan with your before jumping into code generation. This will let you understand exactly what Agent plans to do and precisely how it plans to structure your project.

In this example, we ask Agent to plan out a simple translation application. We are explicit though to let us review the plan before coding begins.

You’ll initially be met by a brief “Working…” message below the red Tabnine logo, followed by a description of what Agent intends to do with its response:

Confirm

You can see its description of the plan is thorough. It lays out its reasons for each file, shows what the project directory will look like, then asks if we would like it to continue.

Once you confirm via the prompt box, Agent will generate the files.

Approve

It will then ask you for confirmation to Run or Reject the file generation for each file (unless you change this to automatic in the Settings).

When it generates the code for a file, you can create that file by hitting the Apply button.

To approve changes to a new version of an existing file, select the circled, green checkmark ✓⃝ above the document window (or reject by hitting the red x mark ⓧ).

This option will only appear if

Do I have to approve “changes” to the file if it’s a new file (i.e., click the green checkmark)?

No. On the initial creation, you can do without clicking it because there are no additional changes — the file now exists. For edits, absolutely. Once you click the checkmark, it will automatically close both the original file and the window comparing the original file code (in red) to highlighted changes (in green).

Reject

If you select Reject the request for whatever reason, Tabnine Agent will then clarify it is unable to finish the task, then list a number of other options.

In this case, the terminal command was rejected because it identified the wrong folder.

Once complete, you can see all the files in your profile folder:

Native Tools

Tabnine Agent contains several Native Tools that help it access your project files, create new ones, edit current ones, or search your project context. All of these can be edited in Settings.

You’ll be met with the following options:

  1. Read Project Files

  2. Create Project Files

  3. Apply Code

  4. Read Terminal

  5. Run Command

  6. List Directory

  7. Get Diagnostics

  8. Workspace Search

You will see indicators for the different Native Tools for most steps of the process. This will help you keep track of Agent’s own workflow. They will appear like this in the conversation with the Agent:

• Exploring and • Explored

• Creating and • Created

• Reading and • Read

• Applying and • Applied

Edits

You can directly request changes from Tabnine Agent in the prompt window, specifying what you would like to change and in what way, as seen in this example below:

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