Developers are adopting AI-powered code generators -- services like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, along with open access models such as Meta's CodeLlama -- at an astonishing rate. Perceiving the demand for alternatives, AI startup Hugging Face several years ago teamed up with ServiceNow, the workflow automation platform, to create StarCoder, an open source code generator with a less restrictive license than some of the others out there.