Sketch Then Generate: Providing Incremental User Feedback and Guiding LLM Code Generation through Language-Oriented Code Sketches

Understand

Crafting effective prompts for code generation or editing with Large Language Models (LLMs) is not an easy task.

• Particularly, the absence of immediate, stable feedback during prompt crafting hinders effective interaction, as users are left to mentally imagine possible outcomes until the code is generated.
• In response, we introduce Language-Oriented Code Sketching, an interactive approach that provides instant, incremental feedback in the form of code sketches (i.e., incomplete code outlines) during prompt crafting.
• This approach converts a prompt into a code sketch by leveraging the inherent linguistic structures within the prompt and applying classic natural language processing techniques.