We’re excited to share that we’re building an AI companion to enable developers to build applications faster by combining Oracle’s areas of expertise with the power of generative AI. AI-powered software development is revolutionizing how code is created, tested, and managed. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey from 2023, 44% of developers currently use AI tools now and 26% plan to soon.

Millions of developers worldwide create and maintain software written in Java and SQL—two of the most ubiquitous languages for applications and databases, in which Oracle is deeply involved. Hundreds of thousands of applications are deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle’s NetSuite has a massive ecosystem that uses SuiteScript for extensions. These areas are all in Oracle’s wheelhouse. The pressure for Java, SQL, OCI, and SuiteScript developers to crank out code is only intensifying, and anything that can help increase velocity is acutely needed.

Oracle Code Assist is an AI code companion designed to boost developer velocity and enhance code consistency. Powered by large language models (LLMs) on OCI and fine-tuned and optimized for Java, SQL, and application development on OCI, Oracle Code Assist provides developers with context-specific suggestions. You will be able to tailor it to your organizations’ best practices and codebases.

Oracle Code Assist will be available as a plugin for popular development environments like JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, and others. Developers within Oracle are actively using Oracle Code Assist today to build new products and services. It will become available to external developers in the future.

Let’s discuss the key benefits of Oracle Code Assist.

Boost developer velocity

Oracle Code Assist will help you increase the speed of your application development with context-specific suggestions and explanations that can reduce time spent on the most mundane aspects of your job.

Time is your most precious resource. By reducing the time spent on common tasks that can be automated and improved by AI, you can produce software much faster. Oracle Code Assist will provide suggestions based on AI foundation models trained on dozens of languages with filters to help prevent generation of non-permissive code. The models will be deployed on OCI and fine-tuned with service APIs, coding patterns, and our own best practices to help your applications run better if you choose to deploy them on OCI.

Enhance code consistency

Oracle Code Assist will help you create software which aligns with your organization’s best practices. You will be able to tailor Oracle Code Assist to your organization’s own codebase, libraries, policies, and practices to help you create software consistent with those proprietary input parameters. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), you will be able to connect your organization’s codebase and guidelines and the tool will then generate suggestions tailored to that content.

Oracle Code Assist will enable you to proactively identify bugs through real-time flags and suggested fixes earlier in the development process. It uses a novel, pretrained LLM-driven localization technique to automatically identify code snippets where bugs exist and then suggest fixes. You then be able to generate unit tests automatically to verify fixes that you apply.

Optimized for Java, SQL, and OCI

Oracle Code Assist will help you update, upgrade, refactor, and modernize polyglot code. While it will handle dozens of programming languages, and you will be able to deploy your applications anywhere, but Java, SQL, and OCI are its true specialties. Oracle Code Assist will also help customers using NetSuite with developing applications and extensions with the SuiteScript scripting language.

No organization knows more about Java than Oracle, the largest contributor to and maintainer of the Java codebase, which means that we can bring in-depth knowledge of Java to provide unique capabilities. You will be able to tune Java code recommendations to dimensions, such as memory efficiency, low latency, and CPU efficiency, to meet your application needs. For example, a developer writing code for an internet of things (IOT) application will be able to tune their suggestions to be better optimized for memory efficiency.

Likewise, Oracle is an acknowledged database leader, and Oracle Code Assist users will be able to employ the tool to upgrade database SQL code. Code upgrade is a common customer requirement and is separate from database version upgrades. This mismatch can lead to issues because customers’ old code might not fully utilize the enhancements, bug fixes, security updates, or performance improvements introduced in the newer database version. Oracle Code Assist will help accelerate database upgrades by helping with refactoring and testing of complex and often customized PL/SQL code, which can be time-consuming and quite expensive.

Oracle Code Assist capabilities

• Generate code to help improve productivity

• Generate test cases to help increase test coverage

• Annotate code to help improve code readability

• Automate language upgrades to help improve performance

• Analyze code to help optimize code quality and efficiency

• Facilitate faster code reviews to help save time

• Explain code to help accelerate learning

• Tailor suggestions based on organizational guidelines

• Scan generated code for non-permissive licenses

• Provide suggestions for code to run better on OCI

Oracle Code Assist is currently undergoing internal user testing. Developers in Oracle are employing it to get their work done fast. And as we use Oracle Code Assist to increase the speed of development, we’re also testing and adding critical functionality and scenarios. It will become available to external developers in the future.

We thank the many external developers and customers who are requesting a product like this from us, and we’re grateful for your patience. We will share our findings as we test and improve Oracle Code Assist before we bring it to you. Stay tuned for more!