SynConfRoute: Syntax-Aware Routing for Efficient Code Completion with Small CodeLLMs

Original Abstract

Enterprises want AI code completion that is both high-quality and private, but they face a tension: proprietary models yield better results yet risk exposing proprietary code, while self-hosting large models is expensive and hard to maintain. As a lighter alternative, small CodeLLMs (1B-3B) can run on a developer's workstation accelerator with code never leaving the machine, but they fail on harder tasks. A practical solution is to use the small model for most requests and selectively route difficult ones to a larger self-hosted model. In this study, we evaluate 29 code specialized LLMs (0.5B-480B) from 12 families on execution-based fill-in-the-middle (FIM) code completion benchmarks across Python, Java, and C++, and find that model family and code specialized training matter more than size: a 3B model matches a 32B model despite being 10x smaller. Analyzing the 3B model's failures, we discover that 46% of its incorrect completions are not valid code. To enable efficient code completion, we propose SynConfRoute, a training-free method that combines token confidence with syntax validation to automatically decide per-request whether to keep the local completion or escalate to a larger self-hosted model. SynConfRoute improves pass@1 by 6.4% over confidence only routing on routine completions and by up to 31% on harder multi-language tasks, and the resulting pipeline achieves 78.9% on routine completions, 7.4% higher than always using the 480B model alone, while reducing accelerator usage by 58%. SynConfRoute generalizes across Python, Java, and C++, improving over confidence only routing on all three languages without ever rejecting a correct local completion. The pipeline uses off-the-shelf models with no custom training, making it immediately deployable in practice.