Dev ToolsTips and Tricks

AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work

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July 13, 2026
AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work AI tools are everywhere. They’re in your phone, your car, your office, and it even made its way into software development. It’s being pushed as a do-it-all solution for coding, and in many cases it does solve, or the very least,  speeds up the busywork. The benefit is real and it’s…
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Tips and Tricks

How to Set Up a Fully Local AI in Visual Studio

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May 19, 2026
VA Intelligence is Visual Assist’s local AI feature. It runs Gemma3 on your GPU through Ollama, both bundled and managed by Visual Assist itself. No API keys, no cloud round-trip, no telemetry pipeline waiting to be audited by your security team. By the end of this guide you’ll have two features wired up inside Visual Studio: Explain with AI and Change Code with AI. If you’ve…
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NewsTips and Tricks

Visual Assist’s AI Assistant: Things You Can Do with VA Intelligence Right Now

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April 23, 2026
If you’ve been following Visual Assist for a while, you might have noticed something a little different about the last few releases. Alongside the navigation improvements, refactoring updates, and parser optimizations, there’s a quieter but important thread running through it all: VA Intelligence. We introduced Explain with AI a few releases back, and with 2026.3 we just shipped Change…
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Tips and Tricks

Why Are Pointers Used in C++? A Practical Guide for Modern Developers

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February 4, 2026
TL;DR Pointers are one of the biggest things that confuse new C++ developers, especially if they started with languages like Python or Java where memory management mostly stays hidden. This guide breaks down why pointers still matter in modern C++, how they help with performance, memory control, dynamic data structures, and low-level system programming, and why they are still heavily used despite…
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