Understanding Auto-Code Generation Techniques

In this chapter, we will look at the following key topics:

• What is a prompt?
• Single-line prompts for auto-code generation
• Multi-line prompts for auto-code generation
• Chain-of-thought prompts for auto-code generation
• Chat with code assistant for auto-code generation
• Common building methods of auto-code generation

With the growth in large language model (LLM) applications, one of the interesting use cases, auto-code generation based on user comments, has become popular. The last few years have given rise to multiple code assistants for developers, such as GitHub Copilot, Codex, Pythia, and Amazon Q Developer, among many others. These code assistants can be used to get code recommendations and, in many cases, generate error-free code from scratch, just by passing a few plain text comments that describe what the user requires from the code.

Many of these code assistants are now backed by LLMs. LLMs are...