ProgAI: Enhancing Code Generation with LLMs For Real World Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated code generation but generate code units with errors because of reasons like hallucinations. Real-world soft- ware development, however, often involves complex requirements with complex dependencies and extensive documentation. To fill this gap, our research pivots towards evaluating LLMs in a more realistic setting real- world repo-level code generation. We introduce ProgAI, a manually curated LLM for proficient code generation. This LLM supports Code generation 4 coding languages – namely C++, Java, Python and C. We assess nine leading LLMs on code generation tasks and observe a decline in their performance. To tackle this, we present ProgAI, a novel LLM-based agent framework that employs external tools for effective code generation. ProgAI integrates four programming tools, enabling interaction with software artifacts for information retrieval, code symbol navigation, and code testing. We implement four agent strategies to optimize these tools’ usage. Our experiments on ProgAI show that ProgAI enhances LLM performance significantly, with improvements ranging from 18.1% to 25%. Further tests on the HumanEval benchmark confirm ProgAI’s adaptability and efficacy across various code generation tasks. Notably, ProgAI outperforms commercial products like Github Copilot, showcasing superior accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate ProgAI’s robust capabilities in code generation, highlighting its potential for real-world repo-level coding challenges.