1- We trained on languages that are most popular on Replit. Markdown is important because you need some amount of natural language in the data, and it will act as a sort of "natural language label" for code.
2- I like how portable it is being a single small model doing a lot of languages. Single code models are an approach that models like Salesforce/Codegen did that, but I believe we beat (or get very close) to their mono models on benchmarks.