Developing Software with Generative AI

While this book is about integrating generative AI, particularly LLMs, into software applications, in this chapter, we’ll talk about how we can leverage LLMs to help in software development. This is a big topic; software development has been highlighted in reports by several consultancies, such as KPMG and McKinsey, as one of the domains impacted most by generative AI.

We’ll first discuss how LLMs could help in coding tasks, and I’ll provide an overview to see how far we have come in automating software development. Then, we’ll play around with a few models, evaluating the generated code qualitatively. Next, we’ll implement a fully automated agent for software development tasks. We’ll go through the design choices and show some of the results that we got in an agent implementation of only a few lines of Python with LangChain. We’ll mention many possible extensions to this approach.

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