KotlinLLM, a research prototype for delegating runtime logic to a large language model (LLM) from Kotlin code, is now going open source and public, JetBrains announced.
Revealed July 28, KotlinLLM is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin prototype for experimenting with LLM-driven “Smart macros” in Kotlin, enabling code generation, runtime updates, and hot-reloading. In software engineering, LLMs are commonly used during development for code completion, code generation, and program comprehension, JetBrains noted, but using an LLM at run time of a compiled application is much less common. The existing options for doing this have the following trade-offs, according to JetBrains:
- Direct runtime delegation is slow, non-deterministic, and costly, and makes the application depend on an LLM service at run time.
- External agent workflows keep the generated logic outside the codebase, where it is harder to review, test, and ship.
- Most prior work (byLLM, nightjar, Healer) targets interpreted languages like Python, not a compiled, statically typed language like Kotlin.
KotlinLLM addresses these limitations in three ways, JetBrains said:
