Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programming
Name
3706598.3714002.pdf
Size
1.27 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c3d5115ddd2f9f2005349edaa68cdefe
Author(s)
Chen, Valerie
Zhu, Alan
Zhao, Sebastian
Mozannar, Hussein
Sontag, David
Talwalkar, Ameet
Date Issued
April 25, 2025
Publisher
ACM|CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Citation
Valerie Chen, Alan Zhu, Sebastian Zhao, Hussein Mozannar, David Sontag, and Ameet Talwalkar. 2025. Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programming. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 881, 1–18.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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, while also uncovering important nuances that influence their usage and effectiveness.
Description
CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714002
