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Tiny Type Agent - Safely Improving Python Code

· 2 min read
Ray Myers
Ray Myers
Mender.AI, Empathy in Tech

As a companion to my talk at The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise Summit, I'd like to demonstrate a minimal yet useful and safe Autonomous DevTool.

Nopilot talk

Definitions​

Let's adopt these loose terms for now.

  • Assistant: Takes ~1 action per user interaction
  • Agent: Completes a meaningful task by taking many actions with environment feedback
  • Autonomous DevTool: AI agent packaged into a polished product, ready to integrate with your software development lifecycle

Use case: Add type-hints to legacy Python​

Suppose you like type checking for Python, but the hints are toilsome to add!

This 400-line Python script shows how to address this with LLMs combined with safegaurds: tiny-type-agent on GitHub.

  • LLM suggests types
  • Agent uses Tree-Sitter to update the syntax tree in a tmp "shadow file"
  • MyPy validates the shadow file
  • Based on the result, Agent updates the original source or discards suggestion

It is perhaps not yet a DevTool because it's not polished (for that, help us finish the larger tool Menderbot), but it shows a workflow that is safe enough to improve production code with extremely low risk. In fact, it has already been used to update production code at a major company and found bugs in the process.

Background​

With patience the most tangled cord may be undone.

Want to help out? See where you fit in!