# Can humans teach machines to code?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Teaching a Minimalist Machine to Discover Recursive Programs for Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06304/) (2026)
- [Induction and Inquiry via Probabilistic Reasoning over Language and Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01815/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of inductive program synthesis is for a machine to automatically generate a program from user-supplied examples. A key underlying assumption is that humans can provide sufficient examples to teach a concept to a machine. To evaluate the validity of this assumption, we conduct a study where human participants provide examples for six programming concepts, such as finding the maximum element of a list. We evaluate the generalisation performance of five program synthesis systems trained on input-output examples (i) from non-expert humans, (ii) from a human expert, and (iii) randomly sampled. Our results suggest that non-experts typically do not provide sufficient examples for a program synthesis system to learn an accurate program.