Share Your Stats to Improve Code Completion via Machine Learning

Andrey Cheptsov

Code completion is, no doubt, one of the most useful features of any IDE. This is why IntelliJ IDEA offers it in so many flavors: Basic Completion, Smart Completion, Second Completion, Second Smart Completion, Statement Completion, and Hippie Completion.

Each of these completion types already uses different algorithms and heuristics, but we’d like take them even further with machine learning, which we believe can be a huge improvement to the completion efficiency. However, to really implement it, we need more data from you.

Here comes the idea of our new plugin: Completion Stats Collector. What this plugin does is it collects data about how you’re using code completion, anonymizes it and sends to us. Again, the plugin doesn’t send any of your personal data or code, just generic info about how code completion is used.

What are the benefits of installing this plugin? Mainly, of course, helping us to improve code completion. Less important, yet nice, you’ll always use the latest and most efficient completion algorithms tuned personally for you. In the beginning you won’t notice any big improvements (the opposite in theory may be possible sometimes). Later, as we keep improving the algorithm, we bet you’ll start noticing the difference.

The downside of using the plugin is a slight outgoing traffic—with the maximum around 20KB/hour, based on how heavily you use code completion. In future we’ll do our best to keep the traffic as low as possible.

Like the idea of helping us improve the completion? Install the plugin! Meanwhile, we’ll be happy to answer questions, get suggestions or feedback.

Develop with Pleasure!

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