Ansible Lightspeed: A Code Generation Service for IT Automation

The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) which can generate code, has made it possible to create tools that improve developer productivity. Integrated development environments or IDEs which developers use to write software are often used as an interface to interact with LLMs. Although many such tools have been released, almost all of them focus on general-purpose programming languages. Domain-specific languages, such as those crucial for IT automation, have not received much attention. Ansible is one such YAML-based IT automation-specific language. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, further referred to as Ansible Lightspeed, is an LLM-based service designed explicitly for natural language to Ansible code generation. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the Ansible Lightspeed service and analyze feedback from thousands of real users. We examine diverse performance indicators, classified according to both immediate and extended utilization patterns along with user sentiments. The analysis shows that the user acceptance rate of Ansible Lightspeed suggestions is higher than comparable tools that are more general and not specific to a programming language. This remains true even after we use much more stringent criteria for what is considered an accepted model suggestion, discarding suggestions which were heavily edited after being accepted. The relatively high acceptance rate results in higher-than-expected user retention and generally positive user feedback. This paper provides insights on how a comparatively small, dedicated model performs on a domain-specific language and more importantly, how it is received by users.

Automated Code generation for Information Technology Tasks in YAML through Large Language Models

The recent improvement in code generation capabilities due to the use of large language models has mainly benefited general purpose programming languages. Domain specific languages, such as the ones used for IT Automation, have received far less attention, despite involving many active developers and being an essential component of modern cloud platforms. This work focuses on the generation of Ansible-YAML, a widely used markup language for IT Automation. We present Ansible Wisdom, a natural-language to Ansible-YAML code generation tool, aimed at improving IT automation productivity. Ansible Wisdom is a transformer-based model, extended by training with a new dataset containing Ansible-YAML. We also develop two novel performance metrics for YAML and Ansible to capture the specific characteristics of this domain. Results show that Ansible Wisdom can accurately generate Ansible script from natural language prompts with performance comparable or better than existing state of the art code generation models.