Thinking Like A Computer: The Missing Skill For Non-Experts Using AI

Exploring a critical challenge for end-user programmers: the lack of computational thinking. Discover how LLM-assisted tools need to be smarter, helping users decompose problems and frame prompts effectively to get the results they want.

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Prior conceptualisations of intelligent assistance for programmers

3. A brief overview of large language models for code generation

4. Commercial programming tools that use large language models

5. Reliability, safety, and security implications of code-generating AI models

6. Usability and design studies of AI-assisted programming

7. Experience reports and 7.1. Writing effective prompts is hard

7.2. The activity of programming shifts towards checking and unfamiliar debugging

7.3. These tools are useful for boilerplate and code reuse

8. The inadequacy of existing metaphors for AI-assisted programming

8.1. AI assistance as search

8.2. AI assistance as compilation ...