Assistance or Disruption? Exploring and Evaluating the Design and Trade-offs of Proactive AI Programming Support

AI programming tools enable powerful code generation, and recent prototypes attempt to reduce user effort with proactive AI agents, but their impact on programming workflows remains unexplored. We introduce and evaluate Codellaborator, a design probe LLM agent that initiates programming assistance based on editor activities and task context. We explored three interface variants to assess trade-offs between increasingly salient AI support: prompt-only, proactive agent, and proactive agent with presence and context (Codellaborator). In a within-subject study (N=18), we find that proactive agents increase efficiency compared to prompt-only paradigm, but also incur workflow disruptions. However, presence indicators and \revise{interaction context support} alleviated disruptions and improved users' awareness of AI processes. We underscore trade-offs of Codellaborator on user control, ownership, and code understanding, emphasizing the need to adapt proactivity to programming processes. Our research contributes to the design exploration and evaluation of proactive AI systems, presenting design implications on AI-integrated programming workflow.

Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences

Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. We present a mixed-initiative approach to ``validate the validators'' -- aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions (be it prompts or code) with human requirements. Our interface, EvalGen, provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. While generating candidate implementations (Python functions, LLM grader prompts), EvalGen asks humans to grade a subset of LLM outputs; this feedback is used to select implementations that better align with user grades. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. In particular, we identify a phenomenon we dub \emph{criteria drift}: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria. What is more, some criteria appears \emph{dependent} on the specific LLM outputs observed (rather than independent criteria that can be defined \emph{a priori}), raising serious questions for approaches that assume the independence of evaluation from observation of model outputs. We present our interface and implementation details, a comparison of our algorithm with a baseline approach, and implications for the design of future LLM evaluation assistants.

Antagonistic AI

The vast majority of discourse around AI development assumes that subservient, "moral" models aligned with "human values" are universally beneficial -- in short, that good AI is sycophantic AI. We explore the shadow of the sycophantic paradigm, a design space we term antagonistic AI: AI systems that are disagreeable, rude, interrupting, confrontational, challenging, etc. -- embedding opposite behaviors or values. Far from being "bad" or "immoral," we consider whether antagonistic AI systems may sometimes have benefits to users, such as forcing users to confront their assumptions, build resilience, or develop healthier relational boundaries. Drawing from formative explorations and a speculative design workshop where participants designed fictional AI technologies that employ antagonism, we lay out a design space for antagonistic AI, articulating potential benefits, design techniques, and methods of embedding antagonistic elements into user experience. Finally, we discuss the many ethical challenges of this space and identify three dimensions for the responsible design of antagonistic AI -- consent, context, and framing.

Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation

We ideate a future design workflow that involves AI technology. Drawing from activity and communication theory, we attempt to isolate the new value large AI models can provide design compared to past technologies. We arrive at three affordances -- dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation -- that summarize latent qualities of natural language-enabled foundation models that, if explicitly designed for, can support the process of design. Through design fiction, we then imagine a future interface as a diegetic prototype, the story of Squirrel Game, that demonstrates each of our three affordances in a realistic usage scenario. Our design process, terminology, and diagrams aim to contribute to future discussions about the relative affordances of AI technology with regard to collaborating with human designers.

ChainForge: A Visual Toolkit for Prompt Engineering and LLM Hypothesis Testing

Evaluating outputs of large language models (LLMs) is challenging, requiring making -- and making sense of -- many responses. Yet tools that go beyond basic prompting tend to require knowledge of programming APIs, focus on narrow domains, or are closed-source. We present ChainForge, an open-source visual toolkit for prompt engineering and on-demand hypothesis testing of text generation LLMs. ChainForge provides a graphical interface for comparison of responses across models and prompt variations. Our system was designed to support three tasks: model selection, prompt template design, and hypothesis testing (e.g., auditing). We released ChainForge early in its development and iterated on its design with academics and online users. Through in-lab and interview studies, we find that a range of people could use ChainForge to investigate hypotheses that matter to them, including in real-world settings. We identify three modes of prompt engineering and LLM hypothesis testing: opportunistic exploration, limited evaluation, and iterative refinement.