GitHub has its Copilot service that we can pay a subscription for. It is a coding assistant in your IDE, which requires a plugin on your editor and performs auto-complete for the code you typed. There are off-the-shelf language models that can generate code like GitHub’s Copilot. But the model can emit code like a function.
To make it an assistant, you need to integrate it with your code editor. Neovim, unfortunately, has a smaller user base and not much progress yet. But there is a VSCode plugin that can use FauxPilot. FauxPilot is a project try to let you self-host a server compatible to GitHub Copilot. Theoretically you can use the GitHub Copilot plugin in your editor (i.e., Neovim has it) but switch to the FauxPilot backend. But since GitHub hard-coded the server address in the plugin, you need to somehow hack the plugin to make it work. The dedicated FauxPilot plugin allows you to configure a different hostname/port number for the server, and that would be more convenient. Of course, how to communicate with the editor so that you can extract the context and provide suggestions seamlessly from the UX perspective would be another story. But the point is, there’s a solution for the client (i.e., editor such as VSCode or neovim). And there’s a model (e.g., CodeGen2). FauxPilot hard-coded to use Salesforce’s CodeGen model.
Indeed, I believe FauxPilot made things too complicated. Of course, its merit is to have a professional deployment of the self-hosted Copilot clone using Docker. But if the goal is to try out models with your IDE, that’s too heavy. Therefore, I trimed down FauxPilot to take only the web interface part: Endpoints are implemented as REST API using FastAPI and uvicorn (hence server code can be asynchronous). From the web requests, we get the code that the user typed as a string (together with some parameters such as model temperature) and we can invoke the model to produce output. The interaction with the model should be a blackbox to the REST API. Hence it is designed as such.
The code is at here: https://github.com/righthandabacus/fauxpilot_lite
See the readme for more details.