Related papers: LiveRec: Prototyping Probes by Framing Debug Proto…
We propose a conceptual integration of deductive program verification into existing user interfaces for software debugging. This integration is well-represented in the "Debug Adapter Protocol", a widely-used and generic technology to…
Context: Developing compilers and static analysis tools ("language tools") is a difficult and time-consuming task. We have previously presented *property probes*, a technique to help the language tool developer build understanding of their…
When working on a program, developers traditionally have to simulate the behavior of the abstract code in their heads until they can execute the application. Live programming aims to support the development and comprehension of programs by…
Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems.…
Programs with constraints are hard to debug. In this paper, we describe a general architecture to help develop new debugging tools for constraint programming. The possible tools are fed by a single general-purpose tracer. A tracer-driver is…
Supervised machine learning techniques have shown promising results in code analysis and optimization problems. However, a learning-based solution can be brittle because minor changes in hardware or application workloads -- such as facing a…
Exploratory programming involves open-ended tasks. To evaluate their progress on these, programmers require frequent feedback and means to tell if the feedback they observe is bringing them in the right direction. Collecting, comparing, and…
Debugging is an essential process with a large share of the development effort, being a relentless quest for offensive code through tracing, inspection and iterative running sessions. Probably every developer has been in a situation with a…
Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to…
Interactive program verification is characterized by iterations of unfinished proof attempts. To support the process of constructing a complete proof, many interactive program verification systems offer a proof scripting language as a…
While significant progress has been made in automating various aspects of software development through coding agents, there is still significant room for improvement in their bug fixing capabilities. Debugging and investigation of runtime…
We examine "vibe coding": an emerging programming paradigm where developers primarily write code by interacting with code-generating large language models rather than writing code directly. We present the first empirical study of vibe…
Mocking allows testing program units in isolation. A developer who writes tests with mocks faces two challenges: design realistic interactions between a unit and its environment; and understand the expected impact of these interactions on…
Vibe Coding (VC) is a form of software development assisted by generative AI, in which developers describe the intended functionality or logic via natural language prompts, and the AI system generates the corresponding source code. VC can…
Live programming environments enable programmers to edit a running program and obtain immediate feedback on each individual change. The liveness quality is valued by programmers to help work in small steps and continuously add or correct…
Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…
Among formal methods, the deductive verification approach allows establishing the strongest possible formal guarantees on critical software. The downside is the cost in terms of human effort required to design adequate formal specifications…
Live coding is a performance and creative technique based on improvised and interactive coding. Many recent endeavors have focused in live coding both because of aesthetics and as a way to alleviate performance drawbacks when the musical…
Backtracking (i.e., reverse execution) helps the user of a debugger to naturally think backwards along the execution path of a program, and thinking backwards makes it easy to locate the origin of a bug. So far backtracking has been…
We show that interactive protocols between a prover and a verifier, a well-known tool of complexity theory, can be used in practice to certify the correctness of automated reasoning tools. Theoretically, interactive protocols exist for all…