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Automatic Bug Fixing Performance of ChatGPT (arxiv.org)
4 points by alok-g on Jan 26, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: ChatGPT was asked to fix 40 known buggy programs, with its answers compared to other automatic repair tools, sometimes fed extra hints like expected output or error messages through chat. With hints it fixed 31 of 40, beating the best earlier tool.

Abstract · An Analysis of the Automatic Bug Fixing Performance of ChatGPT

To support software developers in finding and fixing software bugs, several automated program repair techniques have been introduced. Given a test suite, standard methods usually either synthesize a repair, or navigate a search space of software edits to find test-suite passing variants. Recent program repair methods are based on deep learning approaches. One of these novel methods, which is not primarily intended for automated program repair, but is still suitable for it, is ChatGPT. The bug fixing performance of ChatGPT, however, is so far unclear. Therefore, in this paper we evaluate ChatGPT on the standard bug fixing benchmark set, QuixBugs, and compare the performance with the results of several other approaches reported in the literature. We find that ChatGPT's bug fixing performance is competitive to the common deep learning approaches CoCoNut and Codex and notably better than the results reported for the standard program repair approaches. In contrast to previous approaches, ChatGPT offers a dialogue system through which further information, e.g., the expected output for a certain input or an observed error message, can be entered. By providing such hints to ChatGPT, its success rate can be further increased, fixing 31 out of 40 bugs, outperforming state-of-the-art.

Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke
arXiv:2301.08653 · cs.SE · submitted Jan 20, 2023
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