AI coding assistants and AI-based (or AI-augmented) integrated development environments (IDEs) are now widely-used. This page documents some ways you can use such tools for your work, in particular when using the SCF.
Overview of tools¶
The available tools include a wide variety of AI-based IDEs (such as Cursor), AI-enhanced IDEs (such as VS Code extensions for GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code Assist), and command-line interface (CLI) tools such as Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist. They use a variety of back-end large language models, generally hosted in the cloud, with some tools allowing one to choose amongst a set of models.
This space is moving really fast, so new tools and improved existing tools are likely to change the landscape frequently, and some of the information here may be outdated (please contact us with suggestions!).
Since many of the tools are available either as VS Code extensions or are built on top of VS Code, if you are familiar with VS Code, the interface will look familiar.
Some tools have free access tiers, and one can of course pay out-of-pocket for more intensive use or access to premium back-end models, which some of our graduate students are doing.
The tools generally provide some or all of the following kinds of interactivity:
Inline code completion and code suggestions.
In-editor interactivity for modifying and generating code.
Chat sidebars for asking questions and controlling the AI assistant, including full agent mode in which the AI can carry out complicated workflows.
GitHub Copilot¶
GitHub Copilot is widely used and is available in several contexts, including:
One can use GitHub Copilot in VS Code.
Some limited features are also available in RStudio.
Positron Assistant (a preview feature in Positron as of summer 2025) provides chat-based assistance using Claude (requiring a paid API key) and code completion using GitHub Copilot. In the future, one will likely be able to use GitHub Copilot for chat-based assistance with Positron.
The free version of GitHub Copilot has various limits on requests. You can use the GitHub Copilot Pro version (which has no limits on the use of selected back-end large language models but limits on requests to premium models) through GitHub Education if you are a student or a teacher. (Note that it’s not clear if one can get access if you are a researcher and your ID card does not say “student” or “faculty”.) You’ll need to go through an application process that includes uploading a photo of your Cal 1 Card. This should work even though there is no date on your Card, so long as you have set up multi-factor authentication with GitHub and your name on your Card matches the name associated with your GitHub account.
Ways to use AI assistants with the SCF¶
Run VS Code with GitHub Copilot (or other VS Code extensions providing AI assistants such as Gemini Code Assist or Continue) on your personal machine and connect to the SCF using the remote SSH extension.
With some additional configuration, you can connect to one of the SCF cluster machines from your local VS Code application.
We expect to support the use of Jupyter AI on the SCF JupyterHub (in particular the forthcoming version 3 with various improvements) in the near future.
One can use AI-assisted code completions in RStudio on the SCF JupyterHub. This can be helpful, as it allows you to do a variety of things all couched as code completions, but it doesn’t have the full AI assistance of other tools.
Tools such as Cursor that are built on top of VS Code likely support remote SSH access in similar fashion to VS Code. SCF staff can help with this if needed, although we haven’t explored this ourselves yet (hence the lack of detail here).
There are various AI assistants available through a command line interface (CLI), including OpenAI CLI, Claude CLI, or Gemini CLI with which one can chat with AI models, generate code, or get explanations in the terminal. If you’re interested in using these on the SCF, please let us know.