Pith Number

pith:LIYRG6S4

pith:2026:LIYRG6S4TCNLDJ2HOKFAQR4VZI

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

The Readability Spectrum: Patterns, Issues, and Prompt Effects in LLM-Generated Code

Fengyuan Ran, Hengzhi Ye, Minghui Zhou, Weiwei Xu

LLM-generated code matches human-written code in overall readability but exhibits different issue patterns, and prompt engineering has limited impact on improving it.

arxiv:2605.13280 v1 · 2026-05-13 · cs.SE · cs.AI

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{LIYRG6S4TCNLDJ2HOKFAQR4VZI}

Prints a linked badge after your title and injects PDF metadata. Compiles on arXiv. Learn more · Embed verified badge

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

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

We find that current LLMs produce code with overall readability comparable to human-written code, but displaying distinct readability issue patterns.

C2weakest assumption

The synthesized readability model combining textual, structural, program, and visual features accurately measures readability in a manner that aligns with human perception and practical maintainability.

C3one line summary

LLM-generated code matches human-written code in overall readability but exhibits different issue patterns, and prompt engineering has limited impact on improving it.

References

114 extracted · 114 resolved · 10 Pith anchors

[1] [n. d.]. LeetCode. https://leetcode.com/problemset/

[2] GPT-4 Technical Report 2023 · arXiv:2303.08774

[3] Duaa Alawad, Manisha Panta, Minhaz Zibran, and Md Rakibul Islam. 2019. An empirical study of the relationships between code readability and software complexity.arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.01760(2019) 2019

[4] André Altmann, Laura Toloşi, Oliver Sander, and Thomas Lengauer. 2010. Per- mutation importance: a corrected feature importance measure.Bioinformatics 26, 10 (2010), 1340–1347 2010

[5] Anthropic. [n. d.]. Claude. https://www.anthropic.com/claude/

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T02:44:49.202967Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5a31137a5c989ab1a747728a084795ca224ed3ccd3f1c79288de1cc621b19187

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.13280 · arxiv_version: 2605.13280v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13280 · pith_short_12: LIYRG6S4TCNL · pith_short_16: LIYRG6S4TCNLDJ2H · pith_short_8: LIYRG6S4

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/LIYRG6S4TCNLDJ2HOKFAQR4VZI \
  | 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: 5a31137a5c989ab1a747728a084795ca224ed3ccd3f1c79288de1cc621b19187

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "c4fce59a1e7b1a69fc8a7b5029f7f235ad67858dad0ba61a5938394363dd870d",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.SE",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-13T09:58:21Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "35e8836822ec9828f822e8ed1bf4f045f7011c74490ad06a5fc9e6cbbcb9cda1"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.13280",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}