{"id":1159602,"date":"2026-01-04T10:08:43","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1159602"},"modified":"2026-01-04T10:08:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:08:44","slug":"do-code-models-suffer-from-the-dunning-kruger-effect","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/do-code-models-suffer-from-the-dunning-kruger-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Code Models Suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly collaborate with humans in creative and technical domains, questions arise about the cognitive boundaries and biases that shape our shared agency. This paper investigates the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE), the tendency for those with limited competence to overestimate their abilities in state-of-the-art LLMs in coding tasks. By analyzing model confidence and performance across a diverse set of programming languages, we reveal that AI models mirror human patterns of overconfidence, especially in unfamiliar or low-resource domains. Our experiments demonstrate that less competent models and those operating in rare programming languages exhibit stronger DKE-like bias, suggesting that the strength of the bias is proportionate to the competence of the models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly collaborate with humans in creative and technical domains, questions arise about the cognitive boundaries and biases that shape our shared agency. This paper investigates the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE), the tendency for those with limited competence to overestimate their abilities in state-of-the-art LLMs in coding tasks. 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