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NES: An Instruction-Free, Low-Latency Next Edit Suggestion Framework Powered by Learned Historical Editing Trajectories

Xinfang Chen, Siyang Xiao, Xianying Zhu, Junhong Xie, Ming Liang, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li et al.

arXiv, 2025

Abstract

Code editing is a frequent yet cognitively demanding task in software development. Existing AI-powered tools often disrupt developer flow by requiring explicit natural language instructions and suffer from high latency, limiting real-world usability. We present NES (Next Edit Suggestion), an instruction-free, low-latency code editing framework that leverages learned historical editing trajectories to implicitly capture developers' goals and coding habits. NES features a dual-model architecture: one model predicts the next edit location and the other generates the precise code change, both without any user instruction. Trained on our open-sourced SFT and DAPO datasets, NES achieves state-of-the-art performance (75.6% location accuracy, 27.7% exact match rate) while delivering suggestions in under 250ms. Deployed at Ant Group, NES serves over 20,000 developers through a seamless Tab-key interaction, achieving effective acceptance rates of 51.55% for location predictions and 43.44% for edits, demonstrating its practical impact in real-world development workflows.

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