# Think Like Human Developers: Harnessing Community Knowledge for Structured Code Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14838/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01560/) (2024)
- [MathScale: Scaling Instruction Tuning for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02884/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05692/) (2024)
- [What's Wrong with Your Code Generated by Large Language Models? An Extensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06153/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding the Characteristics of Code Generation Errors Made by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08731/) (2024)
- [From Code to Courtroom: LLMs as the New Software Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02246/) (2025)
- [ACECode: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Aligning Code Efficiency and Correctness in Code Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17264/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Code Generation: The Practitioners Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16998/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multi-Language Software Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01449/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced automated code generation, yet they struggle with complex coding tasks requiring multi-step logical reasoning. High-quality reasoning data is crucial for improving LLMs' reasoning capabilities, but such datasets remain scarce. Existing approaches either rely on computationally expensive reinforcement learning (RL) or error-prone reasoning chains synthesized by LLMs, posing challenges in scalability and accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose SVRC (Structured and Validated Reasoning Chains for Code Generation), a novel framework that mines, restructures, and enriches reasoning chains from community-driven discussions on software engineering platforms. SVRC refines unstructured and incomplete discussions of coding problems by aligning them with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) principles, ensuring that reasoning chains capture real-world problem-solving strategies and support iterative refinement. To evaluate the effectiveness of SVRC, we introduce CodeThinker, an LLM fine-tuned on 12,444 reasoning-augmented samples generated by SVRC. Experiments on LiveCodeBench show that CodeThinker surpasses its base model by 42.86% on medium-level code problems in terms of pass@1 and outperforms GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o by 73.14% and 115.86%, respectively. Our ablation study further highlights that each component of SVRC contributes to the reasoning capabilities of CodeThinker.