Honours Dissertation — Metacognitive Calibration
My BComp Honours dissertation asks whether developers understand AI-generated code as well as they think they do — a scoping review, written in LaTeX from Neovim.
- role
- Researcher & author
- status
- in-development
- date
- 2026 — present
- links
- source private — ask me for a walkthrough
- LuaLaTeX
- latexmk
- Biber
- Neovim + VimTeX
- documents · one shared preamble
- 4
- final report due
- Dec 2026
The question
I've written before about working with AI without becoming its passenger — the rituals of reading diffs and interrogating the agent instead of accepting what it types. My Honours dissertation at Belgium Campus takes that instinct seriously as a research question: do developers understand AI-generated code as well as they think they do? The industry keeps measuring how much faster AI makes us; far less attention goes to whether our confidence in understanding the resulting code tracks our actual understanding. That gap — metacognitive calibration — is what the work maps.
It's a scoping review: it charts the existing evidence rather than running new experiments. The proposal and literature review are behind me; the final report is due December 2026. It's in progress, honestly framed — the shape of the work may still change, and I'm not going to pretend conclusions exist before they do.
Writing happens where everything I do happens — Neovim and LaTeX in a terminal, now on macOS, working the same as it did on Linux.