No Need to Lift a Finger Anymore? Assessing the Quality of Code Generation by ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as machine translation, question answering, summarization, and so on. Additionally, LLMs are also highly valuable in supporting software engineering tasks, particularly in the field of code generation. Automatic code generation is a process of automatically generating source code or executable code based on given specifications or requirements, improving developer productivity. In this study, we perform a systematic empirical assessment of code generation using ChatGPT, a recent and popular LLM. Our evaluation encompasses a comprehensive analysis of code snippets generated by ChatGPT, focusing on three critical aspects: correctness, understandability, and security. We also specifically investigate ChatGPT's ability to engage in multi-round process (i.e., ChatGPT's dialog ability) of facilitating code generation. By delving into the generated code and examining the experimental results, this work provides valuable insights into the performance of ChatGPT in tackling code generation tasks. Overall, our findings uncover potential issues and limitations that arise in the ChatGPT-based code generation and lay the groundwork for improving AI and LLM-based code generation techniques.