Think Before You Code: Dual Reasoning for the NLSafety-Utility Trade-Off in LLM Code Generation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) for code generation are typically evaluated on functional correctness alone, overlooking whether generated code propagates harmful content embedded in the prompt. Prior work has shown that most Code LLMs reproduce offensive identifiers from injected renaming instructions without warning, yet existing approaches focus on detecting harmful content, neglecting functional correctness. Grounded in the Theory of Dual Channel Constraints (which states that code is a dual-channel medium combining an algorithmic (AL) channel for machine execution and a natural language (NL) channel for human communication, creating a unique safety-utility trade-off where a model must balance functional execution with responsible communication), we propose NLSafety-Utility Duality Score (SUDS), a metric that unifies code utility, safety adherence, and warning awareness into a single score across 12 ranked response scenarios, and Dual Reasoning (DR), a structured inference-time technique that requires an explicit safety audit and task-grounded code review before code generation. Evaluated on six LLMs across two benchmarks augmented with harmful keyword injections (820 and 2,135 samples), DR consistently achieves the highest SUDS across all models, improving mean SUDS by 1.32$\times$ to 3.42$\times$ over the baseline, while chain-of-thought prompting yields negligible safety gains and a safety-aware prompt provides only partial improvement. Further analysis reveals that DR's effectiveness scales with model capacity, that the one-shot exemplar primarily stabilizes output format for smaller models, and that structured reasoning cannot compensate for models with limited safety vocabularies.