10 Creating a Coding Copilot Project: This would have helped you earlier
This chapter covers
- Deploying a coding model to an API
- Setting up a VectorDB locally and using it for a RAG system
- Building a VSCode Extension to use our LLM service
- Insights and lessons learned from the project
If you touch code for your day job, you’ve probably dreamed about having an AI assistant helping you out. In fact, maybe you already do. With tools like Github Copilot out on the market, we have seen LLMs take autocomplete to the next level. However, not every company is happy with the offerings on the market, and not every enthusiast can afford them either. So let’s just build our own!
In this chapter, we will be building a Visual Studio Code extension that will allow us to use our LLM right in the code editor. The editor of choice will be Visual Studio Code as it is a popular open source code editor. Popular might be an understatement as Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey showed it’s the preferred editor for 81% of developers[1]. It’s essentially a lightweight version of Visual Studio which is a full IDE that’s been around since 1997.