Baichuan Li

Jayanaka L. Dantanarayana, Yiping Kang, Kugesan Sivasothynathan et al.

Software development is shifting from traditional programming to AI-integrated applications that leverage generative AI and large language models (LLMs) during runtime. However, integrating LLMs remains complex, requiring developers to manually craft prompts and process outputs. Existing tools attempt to assist with prompt engineering, but often introduce additional complexity. This paper presents Meaning-Typed Programming (MTP), a novel paradigm that abstracts LLM integration through intuitive language-level constructs. By leveraging the inherent semantic richness of code, MTP automates prompt generation and response handling without additional developer effort. We introduce the (1) by operator for seamless LLM invocation, (2) MT-IR, a meaning-based intermediate representation for semantic extraction, and (3) MT-Runtime, an automated system for managing LLM interactions. We implement MTP in Jac, a programming language that supersets Python, and find that MTP significantly reduces coding complexity while maintaining accuracy and efficiency. MTP significantly reduces development complexity, lines of code modifications needed, and costs while improving run-time performance and maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of existing approaches. Our user study shows that developers using MTP completed tasks 3.2x faster with 45% fewer lines of code compared to existing frameworks. Moreover, MTP demonstrates resilience even when up to 50% of naming conventions are degraded, demonstrating robustness to suboptimal code. MTP is developed as part of the Jaseci open-source project, and is available under the module byLLM.

Baichuan Li, Larry Powell, Tracy Hammond

The quality of training data is critical to the performance of machine learning applications in domains like transportation, healthcare, and robotics. Accurate image labeling, however, often relies on time-consuming, expert-driven methods with limited feedback. This research introduces a sketch-based annotation approach supported by large language models (LLMs) to reduce technical barriers and enhance accessibility. Using a synthetic dataset, we examine how sketch recognition features relate to LLM feedback metrics, aiming to improve the reliability and interpretability of LLM-assisted labeling. We also explore how prompting strategies and sketch variations influence feedback quality. Our main contribution is a sketch-based virtual assistant that simplifies annotation for non-experts and advances LLM-driven labeling tools in terms of scalability, accessibility, and explainability.

Jason Mars, Yiping Kang, Roland Daynauth et al.

Today's production scale-out applications include many sub-application components, such as storage backends, logging infrastructure and AI models. These components have drastically different characteristics, are required to work in collaboration, and interface with each other as microservices. This leads to increasingly high complexity in developing, optimizing, configuring, and deploying scale-out applications, raising the barrier to entry for most individuals and small teams. We developed a novel co-designed runtime system, Jaseci, and programming language, Jac, which aims to reduce this complexity. The key design principle throughout Jaseci's design is to raise the level of abstraction by moving as much of the scale-out data management, microservice componentization, and live update complexity into the runtime stack to be automated and optimized automatically. We use real-world AI applications to demonstrate Jaseci's benefit for application performance and developer productivity.