Sebastian Simon presenting what topics practitioners are discussing when building LLM-based appilcations - CAIN 2025
#ICSE2025

What is the essence object-oriented programming? It depends on whom you ask. The long answer is available in the preprint of our recently accepted paper: www.computer.org/csdl/magazin...

Marvin Wyrich, Johannes C. Hofmeister, @svenapel.bsky.social , and I dared to go down this rabbit hole.

Debugging performance bugs is a maze of complexity!

We used VR to uncover how developers reason about performance bugs, revealing structured debugging episodes...

To be presented at FSE'25, a preprint is available:
www.se.cs.uni-saarland.de/publications...

➡︎ The paper?

sws.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/wp-content/u...

Thanks to our amazing participants
TU-Chemnitz.de ♥️, all the support from ScaDS.AI ♥️, and the amazing author team ♥️
(5/5)

➡︎ The conclusion?

✔️ Use chatbots to debug & test code
✔️ Teach prompt engineering early
✔️ Watch for prompts about basic concepts—these can signal struggling learners.

💡Chatbots can be great tools for beginners IFF used right!
(4/5)

➡︎ The challenge?

Beginners struggle with:
✘ Writing effective prompts
✘ Understanding what chatbots need to generate useful results

💡Let's teach working with LLMs and prompt engineering alongside coding skills.
(3/5)

➡︎ How do beginners use chatbots?

50% of prompts focus on code generation, but missing context often leads to poor results.

💡 Prompts used for debugging & testing code were game-changers: They boosted solution quality by 72%!
(2/5)

✨Exciting news! Dominik Gorgosch, @norbertsiegmund.bsky.social, Janet Siegmund and my paper '"Ok Pal, We Have to Code That Now": Interaction Patterns of Programming Beginners with a Conversational' Chatbot has been accepted in EMSE Journal!

Ever wondered how beginners use AI to learn programming?⬇︎︎