How to Build Your Own LLM Coding Assistant With Code Llama 🤖

Creating a local LLM chatbot with CodeLlama-7b-Instruct-hf and Streamlit

The coding assistant chatbot we will build in this article

In this hands-on tutorial, we will implement an AI code assistant that is free to use and runs on your local GPU.

You can ask the chatbot questions, and it will answer in natural language and with code in multiple programming languages.

We will use the Hugging Face transformer library to implement the LLM and Streamlit for the Chatbot front end.

How do LLMs generate text?

Decoder-only Transformer models, such as the GPT family, are trained to predict the next word for a given input prompt. This makes them very good at text generation.

The training process of Decoder-only Transformers

Given enough training data, they can also learn to generate code. Either by filling in code in your IDE, or by answering questions as a chatbot.

GitHub Copilot is a commercial example of an AI pair programmer. Meta AI’s Code Llama models have similar capabilities but are free to use.

What is Code Llama?