Form, Not Content? A Preregistered, Placebo-Controlled Evaluation of Learned Error-Conditioned Self-Repair Through Prompts and Weights in Frozen Small Code Models

Frozen small code LLMs are deployed locally, yet the information guiding a retry after a failed attempt is still measured without placebo controls in the self-repair literature.

Frozen small code LLMs are deployed locally, yet the information guiding a retry after a failed attempt is still measured without placebo controls in the self-repair literature. We treat a failed program as a conjecture and an execution counterexample as an oracle-relative…