ChatGPT-Powered 'Scalene' Offers Efficiency Suggestions for Python Programmers

The tech site IT Brew looks at an open-source tool that 'uses AI to offer efficiency-minded suggestions to Python coders.'

Known as 'Scalene,' the profiler — a kind of debugger for performance issues — has been downloaded more than 900,000 times on GitHub. 'It's awesome in general, and amazing for an academic project,' UMass professor Emery Berger, who worked with PhD students Sam Stern and Juan Altmayer Pizzorno on the open-source tool, told IT Brew...

Scalene measures how much time and memory is spent on each line of code — both on average and at peak, [and] how much time is spent in efficient libraries and how much is spent in Python... By selecting a lightning-bolt icon, a user can 'leverage the engine that powers ChatGPT to get an optimization' suggestion, Berger said. In one demo he showed IT Brew, an output recommended a less-memory-intensive move to reduce a very large array created by the code...

'If your Python code already runs fast enough, then you don't need a profiler. But if it's running slow, I think it's a very convenient profiler to reach for,' Berger said.

Link via Dev News.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.