Pith Number

pith:GEIHFZSR

pith:2026:GEIHFZSREV2MLOK6JR3BSHXCXP

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"Like Taking the Path of Least Resistance": Exploring the Impact of LLM Interaction on the Creative Process of Programming

Run Huang, Souti Chattopadhyay, Zeinabsadat Saghi

LLM assistance shortens idea-generation periods in programming and reduces creative moments while final solutions contain similar numbers of ideas.

arxiv:2605.13776 v1 · 2026-05-13 · cs.HC

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\pithnumber{GEIHFZSREV2MLOK6JR3BSHXCXP}

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Participants using LLMs had significantly shorter idea-generation periods (p=0.0004), leading to fewer creative moments (p=0.002), while generated solutions contained roughly the same number of ideas as participant-generated ones.

C2weakest assumption

That the chosen measures of 'idea-generation periods' and 'creative moments' validly capture creativity in programming and that the within-subject design sufficiently controls for individual differences and learning effects across conditions.

C3one line summary

LLM assistance shortens idea-generation periods and reduces creative moments during programming tasks while yielding solutions with comparable idea counts and greater functional correctness.

References

84 extracted · 84 resolved · 2 Pith anchors

[1] Selcuk Acar, Cyndi Burnett, and John F. Cabra. 2017. Ingredients of Creativity: Originality and More.Creativity Research Journal29 (2017), 133 – 2017

[2] doi:10.1080/10400419.2017.1302776 2017 · doi:10.1080/10400419.2017.1302776

[3] Teresa M Amabile. 1983. The social psychology of creativity: a componential conceptualization.Journal of personality and social psychology45, 2 (1983), 357 1983

[4] Reproducibility of Build Environ - ments through Space and Time 2024 · doi:10.1145/3639476.3639766

[6] Homogenization effects of large language models on human creative ideation 2024 · doi:10.1145/3635636.3656204

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T02:44:15.897753Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

311072e6512574c5b95e4c76191ee2bbf381869b1e59d5b822508dade394298e

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.13776 · arxiv_version: 2605.13776v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13776 · pith_short_12: GEIHFZSREV2M · pith_short_16: GEIHFZSREV2MLOK6 · pith_short_8: GEIHFZSR

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/GEIHFZSREV2MLOK6JR3BSHXCXP \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 311072e6512574c5b95e4c76191ee2bbf381869b1e59d5b822508dade394298e

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "513f0b07f6971fe48906c4c9b1a5b7d46ab79b2b3691bdec96f207277056d074",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.HC",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-13T16:54:51Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "0602107b41d2815082ed39a924f8881b756825cd7734ca66a8a05b31acf0aab2"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.13776",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}