10X coders beware: Meta’s new AI model boosts coding and debugging for free

Meta is adding another Llama to its herd—and this one knows how to code. On Thursday, Meta unveiled "Code Llama," a new large language model (LLM) based on Llama 2 that is designed to assist programmers by generating and debugging code. It aims to make software development more efficient and accessible, and it's free for commercial and research use.

Much like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot Chat, you can ask Code Llama to write code using high-level instructions, such as "Write me a function that outputs the Fibonacci sequence." Or it can assist with debugging if you provide a sample of problematic code and ask for corrections.

As an extension of Llama 2 (released in July), Code Llama builds off of weights-available LLMs Meta has been developing since February. Code Llama has been specifically trained on source code data sets and can operate on various programming languages, including Python, Java, C++, PHP, TypeScript, C#, Bash scripting, and more.

Notably, Code Llama can handle up to 100,000 tokens (word fragments) of context, which means it can evaluate long programs.