Pythoness

Pythoness: The priestess of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.

by Emery Berger

Pythoness automatically generates Python code from natural language descriptions.

NOTE: To use Pythoness, you must first set up an OpenAI API key. If you already have an API key, you can set it as an environment variable called OPENAI_API_KEY. If you do not have one yet, you can get a key here: https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-api-key>

The easiest way to install Pythoness is through pip:

python3 -m pip install pythoness

To use Pythoness, you just import the pythoness module and then use the @pythoness.spec decorator to specify the desired functionality:

import pythoness

@pythoness.spec("Compute the nth number in the Fibonacci series.")
def myfib(n: int) -> int:
    ""

This code will internally generate a Python function named myfib that computes the nth number in the Fibonacci series. To actually execute the function, you can call it as you would any other Python function:

for i in range(20):
    print(myfib(i))

Pythoness caches the results of translating natural language to Python, so subsequent executions in the same directory will run much faster (Pythoness creates a database called pythoness-cache.db that saves these translations).

You can guide Pythoness by providing some tests. Pythoness will use tests both to generate the Python code and to validate it. Tests are just a list of strings containing Python code which should all evaluate to True.

@pythoness.spec("Compute the nth number in the Fibonacci series.",
                tests=["myfib(1) == 1", "myfib(2) == 1"])
def myfib(n: int) -> int:
    ""

You can have Pythoness to replace the spec directly in your file with the generated function: just add replace=True:

@pythoness.spec("Compute the nth number in the Fibonacci series.",
                tests=["myfib(1) == 1", "myfib(2) == 1"],
		replace=True)
def myfib(n: int) -> int:
    ""

For example, Pythoness produced this code:

def myfib(n: int) -> int:
    """
    Compute the nth number in the Fibonacci series.

    :param n: The position of the desired number in the Fibonacci series
    :type n: int
    :return: The nth number in the Fibonacci series
    :rtype: int
    """
    if n <= 0:
        raise ValueError("n must be a positive integer")
    elif n == 1 or n == 2:
        return 1
    else:
        fib1, fib2 = 1, 1
        for _ in range(3, n + 1):
            fib1, fib2 = fib2, fib1 + fib2
        return fib2

Pythoness offers a few other ways to control its behavior. These are all arguments to spec. The provided values indicate the the default value.

• max_retries=3: controls the maximum number of retries due to failures (e.g., a function that fails one of the provided tests).

• min_confidence=0.7: sets the minimum level of confidence that the AI system reports regarding the correctness of the generated function (a number between 0 and 1, corresponding to 0% and 100%). Increasing the confidence level may require increasing max_retries.

• verbose=False: set this to True to have Pythoness to output details as it generates and validates code. Mostly useful for developers and for keeping tabs on progress.

• output=False: set this to True to have Pythoness output the generated code the first time the function is called.