Meta's CodeCompose: Enhancing Developer Productivity with AI Code Generation

Highlights

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• Meta has built a code-generating AI model called CodeCompose.

• CodeCompose is similar to GitHub's Copilot.

• CodeCompose can be used to generate code for a variety of tasks.

• CodeCompose can also be used to generate code from natural language descriptions.

• CodeCompose is still under development, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way that developers write code.

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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it has developed a code-generating AI model similar to Copilot, the tool created by GitHub and OpenAI. The new model, called CodeCompose, is part of Meta's efforts to build its own AI infrastructure, including custom chips to speed up the training of generative AI models.

CodeCompose is not yet available to the public, but Meta says that its internal teams use it to get code suggestions for Python and other languages as they type in IDEs like VS Code. The model can also handle Meta's own programming language, Hack, and incorporate internal libraries and frameworks into its recommendations.

The model is based on InCoder, a large language model released by Meta's AI research division. InCoder was trained on public code with permissive, non-copyleft open source licenses from GitHub and GitLab, as well as StackOverflow questions, answers and comments. Meta says that it filtered out poor coding practices and errors from the training data set to reduce the chance of generating problematic code.

CodeCompose can suggest annotations, import statements, and other code snippets based on the surrounding context. Meta claims that thousands of its employees are accepting suggestions from CodeCompose every week and that the acceptance rate is over 20%.

Meta's CodeCompose tool is not the only one in the market that uses AI to generate code. GitHub's Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI's Codex model, is one of the most popular ones. It can write code in over a dozen languages and has been used by over 1 million developers since its launch in June 2021. However, Copilot has also faced some controversies over its potential copyright infringement and ethical issues.

Other competitors include Tabnine, a code completion tool that supports over 20 languages and 15 editors; CodeT5, an open source programming language model built by Salesforce; and StarCoder, a free code-generating system developed by Hugging Face and ServiceNow.

Code-generating AI models are becoming more advanced and accessible, promising to help programmers write faster and better code. However, they also pose some challenges and risks that need to be addressed by the developers and the industry.

CodeCompose can be used to generate code for a variety of tasks, including:

• Writing functions and classes

• Creating loops and conditional statements

• Importing and using libraries

• Debugging code

CodeCompose can also be used to generate code from natural language descriptions. This means that you can simply tell CodeCompose what you want to do, and it will generate the code for you.

CodeCompose is still under development, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way that developers write code. It can help developers to be more productive and to write better code.

Here are some of the benefits of using CodeCompose:

Increased productivity: CodeCompose can help developers to be more productive by generating code for them.

Improved code quality: CodeCompose can help developers to write better code by generating code that is accurate and up-to-date.

Reduced errors: CodeCompose can help developers to reduce errors by generating code that is free of bugs.

CodeCompose is a powerful tool that can help developers to be more productive and to write better code. Follow the Meta's blog post about CodeCompose here.