Scaffold, Not Vocabulary? A Controlled, Two-Tier, Pre-Registered Study of a Popperian Code-Generation Skill
Large language models increasingly write, review, and judge code, and a fast-growing practice equips them with prompt 'skills' that ask the model to reason like a scientist. A prominent example tells the model to act as a Popperian falsificationist, and such skills are reported to improve generated code. But these gains are almost always read off an LLM-as-a-judge, an instrument with documented positional, self-preference, and stylistic biases. We ask: if it appears to help, is the gain from the skill's Popperian content, or from the structure any scaffold imposes? We pre-register a two-tier ablation with three controls: a length-matched placebo, a labels-only scaffold that keeps the Popp...
| Authors | Mehmet Iscan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
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