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  • Estimating Code Comprehension Time Using Large Language Models: A Time Based Evaluation of Java Code Understanding
  • https://doi.org/10.1145/3788149.3788237Copy DOI Icon

Estimating Code Comprehension Time Using Large Language Models: A Time Based Evaluation of Java Code Understanding

  • Dec 12, 2025
  • Navruza Tulkunova +6 more
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Abstract

Understanding source code is a cognitively demanding task, yet existing complexity metrics primarily rely on structural features and overlook actual human effort. This paper introduces a time-based approach to measuring code comprehension using large language models (LLMs). We investigate whether LLMs can estimate the number of seconds a junior developer would need to understand Java source files. Using a dataset of 371 files from the Apache Hive project, we evaluated five LLMs under a uniform prompt design. Human comprehension times, collected through a controlled study involving junior developers, were used as ground truth. Among the tested models, Gemini 2.0 Flash most closely approximated human estimates, while others exhibited systematic bias or output instability. Our findings show that while LLMs can produce interpretable, numeric predictions of comprehension time, achieving consistent accuracy requires prompt refinement and potential model fine-tuning. This work contributes a behavioral perspective to software complexity analysis, offering time-based estimations as an alternative to static metrics.

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