Compiler-Guided Inference-Time Adaptation: Improving GPT-5 Programming Performance in Idris

Abstract: GPT-5, a state of the art LLM from OpenAI, demonstrates strong performance in widely used programming languages such as Python, C++, and Java; however, its ability to operate in low resource or less commonly used languages remains underexplored. This work investigates whether GPT-5 can effectively acquire proficiency in an unfamiliar functional programming language, Idris, through iterative, feedback driven prompting. We first establish a baseline showing that with zero shot prompting the model solves only 22 out of 56 Idris exercises using the platform Exercism, substantially underperforming relative to higher resource languages (45 out of 50 in Python and 35 out of 47 in Erlang). We then evaluate several refinement strategies, including iterative prompting based on platform feedback, augmenting prompts with documentation and error classification guides, and iterative prompting using local compilation errors and failed test cases. Among these approaches, incorporating local compilation errors yields the most substantial improvements. Using this structured, error guided refinement loop, GPT-5 performance increased to an impressive 54 solved problems out of 56. These results suggest that while LLMs may initially struggle in low resource settings, structured compiler level feedback can play a critical role in unlocking their capabilities.