[wvenable]

> Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution

One of the very first tests I did of ChatGPT way back when it was new was give it a relatively complex string manipulation function from our code base, strip all identifying materials from the code (variable names, the function name itself, etc), and then provide it with inputs and ask it for the outputs. I was surprised that it could correctly generate the output from the input.

So it does have some idea of what the code actually does not just syntax.