It is not too long after I told you that I was too cheap to pay $10 a month for github copilot and I came up with the idea for Severus, my own AI pair programmer. It was something that went boom. My blog usually doesn’t have more than 20 or 30 viewers a day (at its best) and for almost a week, I had more than 200 views per day. Since people showed interest in yet another AI pair programmer, I have decided to continue working on severus, more seriously.

My plans for Severus

So in this article, I may discuss a bunch of problems I may face in the long path of creating Severus and making it available as an end-user software. There are some serious concerns, for example when I talked about the idea of Severus with one of my colleagues, he told me he is concerned about the confidential codes he has written.

Almost all of your concerns are valid (except the one who thinks this whole process is handled by the Illuminati) and those are my concerns as well. The next problem I may face is for the scaling, so I perhaps need to hire a well-educated DevOps engineer.

In this section, I explain all of my serious concerns and needs, and I expect some help from you, the kind readers of the article.

The Community

Creating a community around something which is honestly a weekend project, doesn’t seem like a good idea. You may say this thing happened for the Linux kernel as well. You’re right, but this is a little bit different. There are tons of tools which may work much better than Severus.

Also, it is important to know the place for creating the community. A subreddit? A discord server? A room on Matrix? An internet forum? I have no idea honestly.

So this is the biggest concern for me. The community!

Performance and text-generation glitches

The performance is good, thanks to huggingface inference API. Actually, knowing the fact that huggingface API exists, helped me with the implementation. But I still have some concerns here.

My main concern is that BLOOM starts generating some text which is not or cannot be classified as code. I tried different ways to get better results, but I still need some ways to verify the generated result is code and it’s not a text which includes the code. And this is really the hard part I guess.

For this purpose, I may need some help. Validation must be done on the results in order to get a good AI pair programmer, otherwise it’ll become more like an annoying colleague or an intern who knows something, but can’t gather his/her mind.

The Product

And final concern/plan is the product. For current use, I only have a simple application which runs on port 5000 on my laptop. Nothing more. There is no authentication and no user validation system, no monitoring, no scaling, no infrastructure. Basically a MacBook Pro which runs tons of programs daily and severus is currently one of them.

I had a VS Code extension in mind, also I thought of a web app as the MVP, when you can easily copy your code and then use it in your very own projects (and of course it won’t be the best choice for a confidential piece of code).

Although I have ideas in mind, I still need more brainstorming about how this project should be delivered to you as a product.

Conclusion

I still have a lot to do with this project. There might be some language detection to detect if the generated output is the code or not, and also there might be some more code validation to avoid mixing different programming languages.

Overall, this is one of the most difficult and at the same time the funnest projects I’ve ever done. I won’t give up on this, even if it seems like a painful and expensive hobby to people around me 🙂