Design Patterns Are Not Prompt Decorations
TL;DR for operators A software team can tell an LLM to “use Singleton,” and the model may indeed wrap the code in something that looks satisfyingly architectural. Congratulations: the code has learned to wear a blazer. The useful question is whether that blazer still has pockets. In the paper examined here, Kjellberg, Fotrousi, and Staron test 13 LLMs on 164 Java HumanEval-X coding tasks, asking them to generate code that follows the Singleton design pattern while still passing task tests.1 They compare four strategies: direct instruction, binary automated feedback, predicate-specific automated feedback, and predicate-specific feedback with few-shot Singleton examples. ...