Using LLMs in patch generation, patch review and code analysis – Jeff Law

LLMs have become common and their ability is regularly improving. WIthin the guidelines provided by the AI working group for the GCC project, how can we use LLMs to improve patch generation, patch review and code analysis? We will work through examples of using an LLM to identify problems in a patch during the development phase to help understand the strengths and weaknesses of an LLM in this context. Similarly we will look at how a patch reviewer might use an LLM and derive some best practices for using LLMs to generate higher quality patches. The second half of the discussion will show real world examples of using an LLM to identify code sequences that can likely be improved. We will discuss several good optimizations found by LLMs as well as various pitfalls to larger scale LLM analysis.