CodeScholar: Growing Idiomatic Code Examples

Abstract

Programmers often search for usage examples for API methods. A tool that could generate realistic, idiomatic, and contextual usage examples for one or more APIs would be immensely beneficial to developers. Such a tool would relieve the need for a deep understanding of the API landscape, augment existing documentation, and help discover interactions among APIs. We present CodeScholar, a tool that generates idiomatic code examples demonstrating the common usage of API methods. It includes a novel neural-guided search technique over graphs that grows the query APIs into idiomatic code examples. Our user study demonstrates that in 70% of cases, developers prefer CodeScholar generated examples over state-of-the-art large language models (LLM) like GPT3.5. We quantitatively evaluate 60 single and 25 multi-API queries from 6 popular Python libraries and show that across-the-board CodeScholar generates more realistic, diverse, and concise examples. In addition, we show that CodeScholar not only helps developers but also LLM-powered programming assistants generate correct code in a program synthesis setting.