smol-ai/developer is an AI 'junior developer' that scaffolds an entire codebase from a product specification. It also provides importable library functions to embed program synthesis into your own application.
Project overview
The project addresses the failure of rigid, one-shot starter templates by generating coherent, whole-program codebases through an iterative, human-centric prompting workflow.
Project type
AI Agent · AI Coding
Use cases
Coding & Development
Deployment
Refer to project documentation
License
MIT
Best for
Developers and AI engineers who want to generate a codebase from a product specification through an iterative, human-centric prompting workflow.
Key capabilities
Generates an entire codebase for you once you give it a product spec in Git Repo mode.
Provides importable library functions to have a developer agent inside of your own app.
Serves the developer agent via an API implementing the Agent Protocol.
Uses an intermediate step to think through shared_dependencies.md to maintain whole program coherence.
Reads the whole codebase alongside an error message to make specific code change suggestions.
Automatically runs generated code and uses errors as information for reprompting.
Limitations and risks
The feedback loop is currently slow, taking 2-4 minutes to generate a program with GPT-4.
Whole program coherence can suffer if shared dependencies are hallucinated.
Generates code using gpt-4-0613, which can incur significant API costs.
Getting started
Clone the repository, install dependencies with Poetry, and run the tool with a product specification prompt. Setup difficulty is medium because it requires installing dependencies, providing a natural language prompt, and may involve writing Python code to use as a library.
Evidence and sources
README: This is a "junior developer" agent (aka `smol dev`) that either: 1. scaffolds an entire codebase out for you once you give it a product spec 2. gives you basic building blocks to…
GitHub project description: the first library to let you embed a developer agent in your own app!
README: python main.py "a HTML/JS/CSS Tic Tac Toe Game" # defaults to gpt-4-0613
README: This lets you develop apps as a human in the loop, as per the original version of smol developer.
README: git clone https://github.com/smol-ai/developer.git cd developer poetry install # install dependencies. pip install poetry if you need
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