Maria Dhakal

Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Zihan Fang et al.

IDE-integrated AI coding assistants, which operate conversationally within developers' working codebases with access to project context and multi-file editing, are rapidly reshaping software development. However, empirical investigation of this shift remains limited: existing studies largely rely on small-scale, controlled settings or analyze general-purpose chatbots rather than codebase-aware IDE workflows. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale study of real-world conversational programming in IDE-native settings, analyzing 74,998 developer messages from 11,579 chat sessions across 1,300 repositories and 899 developers using Cursor and GitHub Copilot. These chats were committed to public repositories as part of routine development, capturing in-the-wild behavior. Our findings reveal three shifts in how programming work is organized: conversational programming operates as progressive specification, with developers iteratively refining outputs rather than specifying complete tasks upfront; developers redistribute cognitive work to AI, delegating diagnosis, comprehension, and validation rather than engaging with code and outputs directly; and developers actively manage the collaboration, externalizing plans into persistent artifacts, and negotiating AI autonomy through context injection and behavioral constraints. These results provide foundational empirical insights into AI-assisted development and offer implications for the design of future programming environments.

Ali Pourghasemi Fatideh, Wilder Baldwin, Maria Dhakal et al.

LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.

Aman Bhatta, Maria Dhakal, Michael C. King et al.

A central problem in one-to-many facial identification is that the person in the probe image may or may not have enrolled image(s) in the gallery; that is, may be In-gallery or Out-of-gallery. Past approaches to detect when a rank-one result is Out-of-gallery have mostly focused on finding a suitable threshold on the similarity score. We take a new approach, using the additional enrolled images of the identity with the rank-one result to predict if the rank-one result is In-gallery / Out-of-gallery. Given a gallery of identities and images, we generate In-gallery and Out-of-gallery training data by extracting the ranks of additional enrolled images corresponding to the rank-one identity. We then train a classifier to utilize this feature vector to predict whether a rank-one result is In-gallery or Out-of-gallery. Using two different datasets and four different matchers, we present experimental results showing that our approach is viable for mugshot quality probe images, and also, importantly, for probes degraded by blur, reduced resolution, atmospheric turbulence and sunglasses. We also analyze results across demographic groups, and show that In-gallery / Out-of-gallery classification accuracy is similar across demographics. Our approach has the potential to provide an objective estimate of whether a one-to-many facial identification is Out-of-gallery, and thereby to reduce false positive identifications, wrongful arrests, and wasted investigative time. Interestingly, comparing the results of older deep CNN-based face matchers with newer ones suggests that the effectiveness of our Out-of-gallery detection approach emerges only with matchers trained using advanced margin-based loss functions.