The next generation of programmers will have new tools for improving the transparency of where code snippets and generated code is coming from. Leandro von Werra (machine engineer at Hugging Face) presented the BigCode project at DINAcon 2022: a research collaboration inviting us to pick up the tools, use the data, and become more conscientious of how we license and reuse open source code.

Photo of @lvwerra by Oleg Lavrovsky - CC BY 4.0

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Use Am I in The Stack? to see if your code is included in the project, and follow @BigCodeProject to stay up to date with developments. There is not yet a user-facing tool available, but stay tuned!

Learn to work with HuggingFace, where projects like the The Stack - 3 TB of permissively licensed source code that is the basis for BigCode's model weights and datasets - can be found: take the official course online. Example notebooks can be found on GitHub. If you manage to crunch some of this data, drop a link to your notebook on forum.opendata.ch.

Explore the BigCode Dataset and contribute to some of the engineering, ethical and legal issues being worked on. Do you have a relevant professional background? BigCode is a research collaboration that you can apply to join here.