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Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programming

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arxiv 2410.04596 v2 pith:JOCUNC6X submitted 2024-10-06 cs.HC

classification cs.HC
keywords proactiveassistantsassistantdesignprogrammingchat-basedenablingprogrammer
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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While current chat-based AI assistants primarily operate reactively, responding only when prompted by users, there is significant potential for these systems to proactively assist in tasks without explicit invocation, enabling a mixed-initiative interaction. This work explores the design and implementation of proactive AI assistants powered by large language models. We first outline the key design considerations for building effective proactive assistants. As a case study, we propose a proactive chat-based programming assistant that automatically provides suggestions and facilitates their integration into the programmer's code. The programming context provides a shared workspace enabling the assistant to offer more relevant suggestions. We conducted a randomized experimental study examining the impact of various design elements of the proactive assistant on programmer productivity and user experience. Our findings reveal significant benefits of incorporating proactive chat assistants into coding environments and uncover important nuances that influence their usage and effectiveness.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Copilot Arena: A Platform for Code LLM Evaluation in the Wild

    cs.SE 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    An in-IDE pairwise-preference platform for code LLMs reveals that real developer choices rank models differently than static coding benchmarks.

  2. After Talking with 1,000 Personas: Learning Preference-Aligned Proactive Assistants From Large-Scale Persona Interactions

    cs.HC 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A two-stage framework — category-structured fine-tuning on LLM-simulated personas plus on-device activation steering — improves proactive-assistant timing and perceived quality, though the biggest gains are measured w...

  3. Morae: Proactively Pausing UI Agents for User Choices

    cs.HC 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Morae, a UI agent that proactively pauses at ambiguous decision points, helps blind and low-vision users complete more tasks and express preferences better than fully autonomous agents.

  4. ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A unified evaluation framework for proactive dialogue agents, built with 328 synthetic environments across six domains, shows that thinking modes improve target planning but not dialogue guidance in a 22-model comparison.

  5. ProMemAssist: Exploring Timely Proactive Assistance Through Working Memory Modeling in Multi-Modal Wearable Devices

    cs.HC 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A working-memory model built from egocentric vision and audio, embedded in smart glasses, timed proactive reminders more selectively and with less frustration than an LLM-only baseline in a 12-person study.

  6. ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agent

    cs.HC 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An LLM-based UI agent monitors visual analytics interactions, detects when users struggle, infers their intent, and proactively provides context-aware guidance.

  7. Curiosity by Design: An LLM-based Coding Assistant Asking Clarification Questions

    cs.AI 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A fine-tuned classifier and question generator let a small coding assistant detect under-specified prompts and ask for clarification, which users rated better than a baseline in a small study.

  8. A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Research: Systems, Methodologies, and Applications

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey of 80+ Deep Research systems that proposes a four-layer taxonomy (foundation models, tool use, planning, synthesis) and compares commercial and open-source implementations.

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