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Related papers: Designing for Novice Debuggers: A Pilot Study on a…

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Novice programmers often face challenges in fault localization due to their limited experience and understanding of programming syntax and logic. Traditional methods like Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) and Mutation-Based Fault…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Hexiang Xu , Hengyuan Liu , Yonghao Wu , Xiaolan Kang , Xiang Chen , Yong Liu

Fully autonomous teams of LLM-powered AI agents are emerging that collaborate to perform complex tasks for users. What challenges do developers face when trying to build and debug these AI agent teams? In formative interviews with five AI…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Will Epperson , Gagan Bansal , Victor Dibia , Adam Fourney , Jack Gerrits , Erkang Zhu , Saleema Amershi

Researchers have developed numerous debugging approaches to help programmers in the debugging process, but these approaches are rarely used in practice. In this paper, we investigate how programmers debug their code and what researchers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Thomas Hirsch , Birgit Hofer

In software development, encountering bugs is inevitable. However, opportunities to learn more about bug removal are limited. When students perform debugging tasks, they often use print statements because students do not know how to use a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Aoi Kanaya , Takuma Migo , Hiroaki Hashiura

Software development agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in automating tasks like environment setup, issue solving, and program repair. Unfortunately, understanding and debugging such agents remain…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Robert Hutter , Michael Pradel

Learning to program can be challenging, and providing high-quality and timely support at scale is hard. Generative AI and its products, like ChatGPT, can create a solution for most intro-level programming problems. However, students might…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Xinying Hou , Zihan Wu , Xu Wang , Barbara J. Ericson

Large language models (LLMs) have become central to modern AI workflows, powering applications from open-ended text generation to complex agent-based reasoning. However, debugging these models remains a persistent challenge due to their…

Large Language Model (LLM) tools have demonstrated their potential to deliver high-quality assistance by providing instant, personalized feedback that is crucial for effective programming education. However, many of these tools operate…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Huiyong Li , Boxuan Ma

While LLMs are often touted as tools for democratizing specialized knowledge to beginners, their actual effectiveness for improving task performance and learning is still an open question. It is known that novices engage with LLMs…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Jessica Y. Bo , Majeed Kazemitabaar , Emma Zhuang , Ashton Anderson

Providing personalized assistance at scale is a long-standing challenge for computing educators, but a new generation of tools powered by large language models (LLMs) offers immense promise. Such tools can, in theory, provide on-demand help…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Brad Sheese , Mark Liffiton , Jaromir Savelka , Paul Denny

Providing effective feedback for programming assignments in computer science education can be challenging: students solve problems by iteratively submitting code, executing it, and using limited feedback from the compiler or the auto-grader…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Hasnain Heickal , Andrew Lan

Debugging is a critical but challenging task for programmers. This paper proposes ChatDBG, an AI-powered debugging assistant. ChatDBG integrates large language models (LLMs) to significantly enhance the capabilities and user-friendliness of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kyla H. Levin , Nicolas van Kempen , Emery D. Berger , Stephen N. Freund

The evolution of LLM has resulted in coding-focused models that are able to produce code snippets with high accuracy. More and more AI coding assistant tools are now available, leading to greater integration of AI coding assistants into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Neha Rani , Jeevan Ram Munnangi , Austin Matthew Spangler , Donald Honeycutt

Making errors is part of the programming process -- even for the most seasoned professionals. Novices in particular are bound to make many errors while learning. It is well known that traditional (compiler/interpreter) programming error…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Audrey Salmon , Katie Hammer , Eddie Antonio Santos , Brett A. Becker

In this paper, we address the problem of manual debugging, which nowadays remains resource-intensive and in some parts archaic. This problem is especially evident in increasingly complex and distributed software systems. Therefore, our…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Dennis Schiese , Andreas Both

The rise of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a significant advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) (tailored to respond to specific prompts). Despite their popularity, applying such models to debug security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Mohammad Akyash , Hadi Mardani Kamali

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as coding assistants. However, the ambiguity of the developer's prompt often leads to incorrect code generation, as current models struggle to infer user intent without extensive prompt…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Harsh Darji , Thibaud Lutellier

Generating hints for incorrect code is a cognitively demanding task that fosters learning and metacognitive development. This study investigates three designs for personalized, scalable, and reflective hint-writing activities within a data…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Anjali Singh , Christopher Brooks , Warren Li , Juho Kim , Xu Wang

Many non-traditional students in cybersecurity programs often lack access to advice from peers, family members and professors, which can hinder their educational experiences. Additionally, these students may not fully benefit from various…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Tianyu Wang , Nianjun Zhou , Zhixiong Chen

Training large language models (LLMs) on Python execution traces grounds them in code execution and enables the line-by-line execution prediction of whole Python programs, effectively turning them into neural interpreters (FAIR CodeGen Team…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Maximilian Beck , Jonas Gehring , Jannik Kossen , Gabriel Synnaeve