Coeditor: Leveraging Contextual Changes for Multi-round Code Auto-editing

Abstract

Developers often dedicate significant time to maintaining and refactoring existing code. However, most prior work on generative models for code focuses solely on creating new code, neglecting the unique requirements of editing existing code. In this work, we explore a multi-round code auto-editing setting, aiming to predict edits to a code region based on recent changes within the same codebase. Our model, Coeditor, is a fine-tuned CodeT5 model with enhancements specifically designed for code editing tasks. We encode code changes using a line diff format and employ static analysis to form large customized model contexts, ensuring appropriate information for prediction. We collect a code editing dataset from the commit histories of 1650 open-source Python projects for training and evaluation. In a simplified single-round, single-edit task, Coeditor significantly outperforms the best code completion approach -- nearly doubling its exact-match accuracy, despite using a much smaller model -- demonstrating the benefits of incorporating editing history for code completion. In a multi-round, multi-edit setting, we observe substantial gains by iteratively prompting the model with additional user edits. We open-source our code, data, and model weights to encourage future research and release a VSCode extension powered by our model for interactive usage