Replication Package for "Prompt Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Generative AI Programming Assistance"

This record contains the experimental dataset and replication materials supporting the study “Prompt Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Generative AI Programming Assistance.” The experiment compared seven prompting strategies—zero-shot, role-based, structured, few-shot, hint-based, Socratic, and iterative refinement—across six introductory Python tasks. The design comprised 42 task–strategy cells with five stochastic replications per cell, yielding 210 experimental episodes and 330 recorded AI responses. The deposit includes the scored dataset, frozen hidden tests and rubrics, raw prompt/response transcripts, offline token-count data, and scripts used to reproduce the blocked statistical analyses. Token counts are offline counts of recorded user-input and AI-output text and are not platform-reported API usage.