On the Road to Personalized Code Intelligence: Portraiting and Assisting Developers Based on Their In-IDE Behaviors

Abstract

The rapid advancement of LLMs has opened new opportunities in automated software engineering, driving progress in code understanding, agent-based workflows, and productivity tools. However, existing code intelligence systems have largely sidelined the end-users they aim to serve—the developers themselves. Developers exhibit substantial heterogeneity across multiple dimensions: coding style, toolchain preferences, domain-specific expertise, and problem-solving strategies. Failing to account for these individual differences directly compromises both the effectiveness of code intelligence and the likelihood of its adoption. For example, a senior architect and a junior engineer ask: "Describe the authorization module." Without personalized context, the system produces a uniform response—verbose for the expert, incomprehensible for the novice. This gap motivates a fundamental shift: from one-size-fits-all to one-size-fits-one code intelligence. A developer's dynamic in-IDE behaviors—code authoring patterns, navigation pathways, debugging trajectories—implicitly encode a rich representation of their competencies and habits. If captured and interpreted systematically, these signals can enable Personalized Code Intelligence, formalized as: [EQUATION] where P is the developer persona derived from IDE behaviors, injected alongside code context C and instruction ℐ.