More improvements to the coding assistant

Aug 9, 2023

This release considerably improves the Sourcery coding assistant recipes and chat. Basic support for non-Python languages has been added. We are also introducing two new modes: Troubleshooting and Code Review.

The assistant is currently only available in closed alpha. If you want to get early access to it, please sign up to the waitlist.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Reach out at hello@sourcery.ai or on Twitter @SourceryAI. Join the Sourcery Discord Community. Ask for help or suggest improvements on GitHub.

Full Changelog - Release 1.7.0

Features

This new version of Sourcery includes more features and improvements to our coding assistant:

• Added a new coding_assistant.project_description field to the Sourcery configuration file (.sourcery.yaml). This field is used to inform the Sourcery coding assistant about the project and improve the quality of the suggestions. For instance, an appropriate .sourcery.yaml file for the sourcery-analytics project would contain

  coding_assistant:
      project_description: |-
          Sourcery Analytics is a command line tool and library for statically analyzing
          Python code quality.

• Added basic support for non-Python languages:
  • C
  • C++
  • C#
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Shell scripts
  • Ruby
  • Rust
  • TypeScript
• Split the “Logic” section of the Explain Code recipe into “What?” and “How?” sections
• Made the chat system message more informative, thus improving model responses
• Improved the Optimize Performance recipe
• Added a new Troubleshooting mode, which will be gradually rolled out to users
• Added a new Code Review mode, which will also be gradually rolled out to users
• Users with access to the coding assistant first need to opt in to use it

Bug Fixes

• Prevent TypeErrors when retrieving the currently active file
• Fix exception raised when generating code lens where a Python function has no body