Is ChatGPT a Good Software Librarian? An Exploratory Study on the Use of ChatGPT for Software Library Recommendations

Understand

Software libraries play a critical role in the functionality, efficiency, and maintainability of software systems.

• As developers increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline their coding processes, the effectiveness of these models in recommending appropriate libraries becomes crucial yet remains largely unexplored.
• In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a software librarian and identify areas for improvement.
• We conducted an empirical study using GPT-3.5 Turbo to generate Python code for 10,000 Stack Overflow questions.