Next Edit Prediction: Learning to Predict Code Edits from Context and Interaction History

TL;DR

This paper introduces Next Edit Prediction, a new task to anticipate developers' next code edits by analyzing recent interaction history, aiming to improve AI-powered coding assistants' proactive suggestions.

Contribution

It defines the Next Edit Prediction task, creates a dataset and benchmark, and evaluates models to enable proactive code editing suggestions based on interaction history.

Findings

Fine-tuned models outperform baselines in predicting next edits.

The approach improves the seamlessness of code editing workflows.

Proactive predictions can reduce context-switching for developers.

Abstract

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions. The code is available at https://github.com/lurf21/NextEditPrediction.