“AI-Assisted Performance Engineering of Software Systems,” Master's thesis, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., –
Open.
Increasingly capable AI models cannot only be used to vibe code projects without any programming skills, but also to assist engineers when enhancing, refactoring, and securing existing code. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate how well such models can be utilized for improving the performance of existing applications by identifying and mitigating performance issues. The thesis should particularly focus on publicly available coding models that can be deployed locally (e.g., gpt-oss:20b, Qwen3.5-coder:35b, glm-4.7-flash, gemma4:31b). As part of thesis, appropriate use cases for benchmarking the models need to be identified from literature and preparated. This involves different performance issues in software code - both obvious and rather subtle and difficult to detect. The models should then be tested and evaluated against these cases and finally synthesized in a comparative summary.