In recent years,Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved in generating high-quality code, enabling their integration into developers' Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) as code assistants. These assistants, such as GitHub Copilot, deliver real-time code suggestions and can greatly enhance developers' productivity. However, the environmental impact of these tools, in particular their energy consumption, remains a key concern. This paper investigates the energy consumption of LLM-based code assistants by simulating developer interactions with GitHub Copilot and analyzing various configuration factors. We collected a dataset of development traces from 20 developers and conducted extensive software project development simulations to measure energy usage under different scenarios. Our findings reveal that the energy consumption and performance of code assistants are influenced by various factors, such as the number of concurrent developers, model size, quantization methods, and the use of streaming. Notably, a substantial portion of generation requests made by GitHub Copilot is either canceled or rejected by developers, indicating a potential area for reducing wasted computations. Based on these findings, we share actionable insights into optimizing configurations for different use cases, demonstrating that careful adjustments can lead to significant energy savings.

In this paper, an approach to training and evaluating an adapter model for the popular language model "zephyr-7b-beta" is described. The adapter was developed to improve the performance of the base model in tasks related to programming and understanding the Russian language. Considering the high quality of the original model in tasks in the English language, the goal of the research was to expand its linguistic and technical spectrum. The proposed adapter was trained using a large and diverse dataset, including question-answer pairs related to programming, as well code-related texts in Russian language. The applied training methodology ensures an improvement in the model's quality of answers in understanding and generating Python code based on Russian instructions. We evaluated the performance of the base model with the installed adapter using various metrics, comparing it to the base model as well as other state-of-the-art models in this field. The obtained results showed significant improvement, both in tasks related to writing Python code and in processing the Russian language, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed adapter.

LLM-based code assistants are becoming increasingly popular among developers. These tools help developers improve their coding efficiency and reduce errors by providing real-time suggestions based on the developer's codebase. While beneficial, these tools might inadvertently expose the developer's proprietary code to the code assistant service provider during the development process. In this work, we propose two complementary methods to mitigate the risk of code leakage when using LLM-based code assistants. The first is a technique for reconstructing a developer's original codebase from code segments sent to the code assistant service (i.e., prompts) during the development process, enabling assessment and evaluation of the extent of code leakage to third parties (or adversaries). The second is CodeCloak, a novel deep reinforcement learning agent that manipulates the prompts before sending them to the code assistant service. CodeCloak aims to achieve the following two contradictory goals: (i) minimizing code leakage, while (ii) preserving relevant and useful suggestions for the developer. Our evaluation, employing GitHub Copilot, StarCoder, and CodeLlama LLM-based code assistants models, demonstrates the effectiveness of our CodeCloak approach on a diverse set of code repositories of varying sizes, as well as its transferability across different models. In addition, we generate a realistic simulated coding environment to thoroughly analyze code leakage risks and evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed mitigation techniques under practical development scenarios.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) on code-related tasks has shown the potential of fully automated software development. In light of this, we introduce a new software engineering task, namely Natural Language to code Repository (NL2Repo). This task aims to generate an entire code repository from its natural language requirements. To address this task, we propose a simple yet effective framework CodeS, which decomposes NL2Repo into multiple sub-tasks by a multi-layer sketch. Specifically, CodeS includes three modules: RepoSketcher, FileSketcher, and SketchFiller. RepoSketcher first generates a repository's directory structure for given requirements; FileSketcher then generates a file sketch for each file in the generated structure; SketchFiller finally fills in the details for each function in the generated file sketch. To rigorously assess CodeS on the NL2Repo task, we carry out evaluations through both automated benchmarking and manual feedback analysis. For benchmark-based evaluation, we craft a repository-oriented benchmark, SketchEval, and design an evaluation metric, SketchBLEU. For feedback-based evaluation, we develop a VSCode plugin for CodeS and engage 30 participants in conducting empirical studies. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness and practicality of CodeS on the NL2Repo task.

As Computational Thinking (CT) continues to permeate younger age groups in K-12 education, established CT platforms such as Scratch face challenges in catering to these younger learners, particularly those in the elementary school (ages 6-12). Through formative investigation with Scratch experts, we uncover three key obstacles to children's autonomous Scratch learning: artist's block in project planning, bounded creativity in asset creation, and inadequate coding guidance during implementation. To address these barriers, we introduce ChatScratch, an AI-augmented system to facilitate autonomous programming learning for young children. ChatScratch employs structured interactive storyboards and visual cues to overcome artist's block, integrates digital drawing and advanced image generation technologies to elevate creativity, and leverages Scratch-specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) for professional coding guidance. Our study shows that, compared to Scratch, ChatScratch efficiently fosters autonomous programming learning, and contributes to the creation of high-quality, personally meaningful Scratch projects for children.

Language models are promising solutions for tackling increasing complex problems. In software engineering, they recently attracted attention in code assistants, with programs automatically written in a given programming language from a programming task description in natural language. They have the potential to save time and effort when writing code. However, these systems are currently poorly understood, preventing them from being used optimally. In this paper, we investigate the various input parameters of two language models, and conduct a study to understand if variations of these input parameters (e.g. programming task description and the surrounding context, creativity of the language model, number of generated solutions) can have a significant impact on the quality of the generated programs. We design specific operators for varying input parameters and apply them over two code assistants (Copilot and Codex) and two benchmarks representing algorithmic problems (HumanEval and LeetCode). Our results showed that varying the input parameters can significantly improve the performance of language models. However, there is a tight dependency when varying the temperature, the prompt and the number of generated solutions, making potentially hard for developers to properly control the parameters to obtain an optimal result. This work opens opportunities to propose (automated) strategies for improving performance.