Paper

Scaffold, Not Vocabulary? A Controlled, Two-Tier, Pre-Registered Study of a Popperian Code-Generation Skill

arXiv:2606.06454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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…

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