Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2405.14388

Evaluation of the Programming Skills of Large Language Models

Luc Bryan Heitz·Joun Chamas·Christopher Scherb
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The advent of Large Language Models (LLM) has revolutionized the efficiency and speed with which tasks are completed, marking a significant leap in productivity through technological innovation. As these chatbots tackle increasingly complex tasks, the challenge of assessing the quality of their outputs has become paramount. This paper critically examines the output quality of two leading LLMs, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini AI, by comparing the quality of programming code generated in both their free versions. Through the lens of a real-world example coupled with a systematic dataset, we investigate the code quality produced by these LLMs. Given their notable proficiency in code generation, this aspect of chatbot capability presents a particularly compelling area for analysis. Furthermore, the complexity of programming code often escalates to levels where its verification becomes a formidable task, underscoring the importance of our study. This research aims to shed light on the efficacy and reliability of LLMs in generating high-quality programming code, an endeavor that has significant implications for the field of software development and beyond.

Explore related subjects

cs.SEcs.CLcs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Luc Bryan Heitz, Joun Chamas, Christopher Scherb. 2024-05-23. Evaluation of the Programming Skills of Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14388

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Is Vibe Coding Safe? Benchmarking Vulnerability of Agent-Generated Code in Real-World Tasks

Vibe coding is a new software development paradigm in which human engineers prompt a large language model (LLM) agent to complete complex coding tasks with little supervision. Although vibe coding is increasingly adopted, is the generated code really safe to deploy in production? To investigate this question, we propose SUSVIBES, a benchmark consisting of 186 feature-request software engineering tasks from real-world open-source projects, for which, human programmers committed vulnerable implementations. We evaluate 12 widely used coding agentic settings with frontier models on the benchmark. Disturbingly, all agents perform poorly in terms of software security. Although 57% of the solutions from SWE-Agent with Claude 4 Sonnet are functionally correct, only 11.8% are secure. Further experiments demonstrate that preliminary security strategies, such as augmenting the feature request with vulnerability hints, cannot mitigate these security issues. Our findings raise serious concerns about the widespread adoption of vibe coding, particularly in security-sensitive applications. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/susvibes. The leaderboard is at https://leililab.github.io/susvibes-leaderboard.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Why3-py: A Tool for Formal Verification of Hypothesis Testing and Meta-Analysis in Python

The reproducibility crisis in scientific research has received widespread recognition, thereby increasing the importance of meta-analyses that integrate statistical analyses from multiple studies. However, statistical methods often have ambiguous and implicit underlying assumptions, which can lead to their erroneous applications and interpretations. To address this issue, we propose a formal verification framework for statistical Python programs. Specifically, we present Why3-py, a Python front-end for the Why3 verification platform that transforms Python code into verification-oriented WhyML representations, addressing the challenges arising from Python's dynamic typing and runtime polymorphism. Furthermore, we extend the StatWhy tool to support the verification of meta-analysis methods. These tools enable meta-analysts to identify overlooked assumptions and misuse of analyses, and to verify the correct use of hypothesis testing and meta-analysis methods in Python code.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

What is the Difference Between Me and You? Benchmarking the Quality Gap Between Human-Written and AI-Generated Code

AI coding assistants are becoming co-authors of production software, yet their evaluation centers on functional correctness, leaving open whether their code differs from human code in the quality dimensions dominating lifecycle cost. We compare human-written and AI-generated code at scale: 787,562 function pairs across Python, Java, and C, each human function mined from open-source repositories paired with implementations generated from its docstring by three AI assistants (OpenAI GPT models, DeepSeek-Coder, Qwen2.5-Coder). We characterize structural complexity and statistical naturalness, and map static-analysis findings onto Orthogonal Defect Classification for defects and the Common Weakness Enumeration for vulnerabilities, making authors and languages directly comparable. AI-generated code is structurally compressed and stylistically templated: roughly half the size and branching of human code, clustering apart at the style level. Defect profiles differ in kind: human code concentrates issues of mature codebases, AI code repetitive boilerplate; security is language-dependent, with LLMs producing more, and more severe, findings in Python and Java but fewer high-severity memory-safety findings than humans in C. Once size is controlled for, complexity metrics carry little signal, while naturalness separates authors. Finally, we release CQBench, a benchmark of 27,346 issue-prone tasks with baselines and an evaluation pipeline for quality assurance and security testing.

cs.SE↗