Athena: Intermediate Representations for Iterative Scaffolded App Generation with an LLM
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866916922763771904 |
|---|---|
| author | Beason, Jazbo Cheng, Ruijia Schoop, Eldon Nichols, Jeffrey |
| author_facet | Beason, Jazbo Cheng, Ruijia Schoop, Eldon Nichols, Jeffrey |
| contents | It is challenging to generate the code for a complete user interface using a Large Language Model (LLM). User interfaces are complex and their implementations often consist of multiple, inter-related files that together specify the contents of each screen, the navigation flows between the screens, and the data model used throughout the application. It is challenging to craft a single prompt for an LLM that contains enough detail to generate a complete user interface, and even then the result is frequently a single large and difficult to understand file that contains all of the generated screens. In this paper, we introduce Athena, a prototype application generation environment that demonstrates how the use of shared intermediate representations, including an app storyboard, data model, and GUI skeletons, can help a developer work with an LLM in an iterative fashion to craft a complete user interface. These intermediate representations also scaffold the LLM's code generation process, producing organized and structured code in multiple files while limiting errors. We evaluated Athena with a user study that found 75% of participants preferred our prototype over a typical chatbot-style baseline for prototyping apps. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20263 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Athena: Intermediate Representations for Iterative Scaffolded App Generation with an LLM Beason, Jazbo Cheng, Ruijia Schoop, Eldon Nichols, Jeffrey Human-Computer Interaction It is challenging to generate the code for a complete user interface using a Large Language Model (LLM). User interfaces are complex and their implementations often consist of multiple, inter-related files that together specify the contents of each screen, the navigation flows between the screens, and the data model used throughout the application. It is challenging to craft a single prompt for an LLM that contains enough detail to generate a complete user interface, and even then the result is frequently a single large and difficult to understand file that contains all of the generated screens. In this paper, we introduce Athena, a prototype application generation environment that demonstrates how the use of shared intermediate representations, including an app storyboard, data model, and GUI skeletons, can help a developer work with an LLM in an iterative fashion to craft a complete user interface. These intermediate representations also scaffold the LLM's code generation process, producing organized and structured code in multiple files while limiting errors. We evaluated Athena with a user study that found 75% of participants preferred our prototype over a typical chatbot-style baseline for prototyping apps. |
| title | Athena: Intermediate Representations for Iterative Scaffolded App Generation with an LLM |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20263 |