The paper introduces rebuild‑dossier, an open‑source tool that locks an application’s real interface before code is written and enforces one‑test‑at‑a‑time building through automated checks. In experiments, a compliant agent failed a held‑back test while a rule‑breaking agent passed, showing that a passing test suite can be gamed. The study also demonstrates that the automated check mechanism, rather than interface‑locking alone, is crucial for reliable rebuilds, and that multi‑level verification catches errors that single‑level checks miss.
By Parker Fawcett
The paper introduces ReviveBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate coding agents’ ability to revive non‑running software and reconstruct industrial engines from open specifications. It comprises two families of tasks—revival (ten tasks addressing dependency issues, missing modules, legacy builds, and GPU models) and reconstruction (thirteen tasks covering numerical, geometric, hardware, and transactional systems). The benchmark uses hidden verifiers calibrated against native environments, engineering tools, or reference implementations, and the authors report that the strongest evaluated model passes all revival tasks and most reconstruction tasks, while also uncovering verifier defects that highlight measurement error in executable verification.
By Tianyu Liu, Dingyuan Dai, Yufan Du, Zhen Yang
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can automatically verify no-code bug fixes—solutions that instruct users to change settings, upgrade versions, or alter workflows—by executing them in a real browser environment. Using 322 fixes from a benchmark, the study tests three executor agents (OpenCUA‑72B, Claude Sonnet 5, and Meta’s Muse Glimmer) and finds that only 17.6% of issues could be set up and passed sanity checks, with resolution rates ranging from 14.6% to 49.7% depending on the executor. Even the best configuration resolved fewer than half of the fixes, and executor choice significantly affected outcomes, highlighting the need for execution-based verification before such fixes reach users.
By Utku Boran Torun, Veli Karakaya, Eray T\"uz\"un
REFINE is a tool-agnostic, evidence-aware multi-agent approach that generates Java file-level refactoring candidates by combining static analysis, smell-informed planning, LLM-based transformation, and automated re-analysis. In experiments on 450 Java files from 15 open-source systems, REFINE reduced detected code smells by 68–73% across three LLM configurations, achieving higher median reductions with smaller edits compared to a direct-prompt baseline. However, the tool’s outputs still pose risks such as assert/fail-call changes and public-method removal, requiring compilation, testing, dependency analysis, and human review before deployment.
By Muhammad Waseem, Aakash Ahmad, Pekka Abrahamsson
SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to participant performance. In the arena, two agents take turns as Red and Blue: Red proposes a feature, injects a subtle bug, and must repair it blind, while Blue reviews the pull request without knowing the bug and must pass all tests. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories across five languages showed GPT‑5.5/Codex CLI as the top solver and Claude Opus 4.8/mini‑swe‑agent as the top task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.
By Wei Minn, Zhensu Sun, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
arXiv:2608. 09072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-powered coding agents are increasingly used to modify existing code repositories, for example, by adding features or fixing bugs.
By Xin Zhou, Chun Yong Chong, Kisub Kim, Yun Peng, Rui Shu, Zihan Wu, Xu Han, Guowen Yuan, Zeyang Zhuang, Jounghoon Kim, Jeongjin Ju, Seongmin Ju, Taein Yoon, David Lo
arXiv:2607. 15854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents can fix a failing example without preserving the domain rule that made it fail, so later generations can repeat the same plausible mistake.
By Muness Castle, Eric Rubeck
arXiv:2607. 18161v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents are increasingly used to accelerate code generation in many downstream tasks, such as fixing bugs, building applications, and prototyping.
By Alex Mathai, Shobini Iyer, Aleksandr Nogikh, Petros Maniatis, Franjo Ivancic, Junfeng Yang, Baishakhi Ray
Autonomous agents that author building information models need more than access to a host API. They need a representation of what they intended, what a compiler decided on their behalf, what was refus...
SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to the agents’ capabilities. In the arena, two agents take turns modifying a real repository: the Red agent adds a feature, introduces a subtle bug, and the Blue agent must fix it without knowing the bug exists. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories in five languages showed GPT‑5.5 as the best solver and Claude Opus 4.8 as the best task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.
arXiv:2608. 13867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems.
By Stephanie Jarmak
arXiv:2607. 24604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generate--test--revise loops are common in coding agents, but repetition alone provides no reliability guarantee.
By Xueping Gao, Jianwei Yang, Qiang Yang