Oracle unveils AI-powered coding assistant

Oracle has announced Oracle Code Assist, an AI-powered coding assistant that will provide developers with context-specific suggestions that can be tailored to an organization’s best practices and codebases.

Oracle did not provide an availability date for Oracle Code Assist, but said that developers at Oracle have been using the tool to build Oracle products and services. Oracle Code Assist can be used to write, upgrade, and refactor code written in most modern programming languages, the company said.

Powered by large language models (LLMs) running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Code Assist is optimized for Java, SQL, and general application development on OCI. It also supports Ruby and C++ and is being tested for use with Python, the Terraform infrastructure-as-code language, and the Netsuite SuiteScript scripting language.

Oracle Code Assist addresses multiple steps in the software development life cycle by providing code snippets, dependency analysis, error mitigation alternatives, test cases, annotation, summarization, and documentation, Oracle said. It is deployed as a development environment plugin for the JetBrains IntelliJ Idea IDE or Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. The tool is trained to offer expert, opinionated feedback to help developers, build, optimize, and upgrade applications wherever they run.

Trained on a repository of software developed over many years, Oracle Code Assist will be equipped to serve organizations no matter where applications are deployed, Oracle said. The assistant will be fine-tuned with OCI service APIs, coding patterns, and Oracle software development practices from Java, SQL, OCI, and other technologies such as NetSuite SuiteScript.

Oracle said Oracle Code Assist will improve developer velocity through code generation, code annotation, and the generation of API documentation or comments to describe code functionality. Other benefits include code explainability, through plain language summaries of code, faster code reviews, and test coverage generation. The ability of Oracle Code Assist to create unit and functional tests based on the context of the code will help developers improve test quality, Oracle said.

Oracle listed five ways it believes Oracle Code Assist will help developers enhance code consistency and optimization:

• Tailored suggestions that incorporate code frameworks, internal libraries, best practices, and industry-specific standards to generate organization-specific code.
• Code origination context that helps ensure code is not sourced from non-permissive licenses.
• Automated language upgrades that update existing code using the current language version and newer libraries.
• Code analysis that identifies bugs and inefficiencies.
• OCI optimization suggestions that draws on OCI service APIs, coding patterns, and best practices for applications to run on OCI.