English

Test-Oriented Programming: rethinking coding for the GenAI era

Software Engineering 2026-04-10 v1

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have shown astonishing capability of generating software code, leading to its use to support developers in programming. Proposed tools have relied either on assistants for improved auto-complete or multi-agents, in which different model instances are orchestrated to perform parts of a problem to reach a complete solution. We argue that LLMs can enable a higher-level of abstraction, a new paradigm we called Test-Oriented Programming (TOP). Within this paradigm, developers only have to check test code generated based on natural language specifications, rather than focusing on production code, which could be delegated to the LLMs. To evaluate the feasibility of this proposal, we developed a proof-of-concept tool and used it to generate a small command-line program employing two different LLMs. We obtained promising results and identified challenges for the use of this paradigm for real projects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.08102,
  title  = {Test-Oriented Programming: rethinking coding for the GenAI era},
  author = {Jorge Melegati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08102},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted as a poster in the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)