Engineering Reliable Coding Agents: Evaluating and Operating the System Around the Model
arXiv:2608. 13867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems.
The paper reports a failure study of a production agentic software‑delivery platform, analyzing 147 incidents across 81 runs. It shows that the standard reliability primitives—retry, timeout, and error‑rate circuit breaking—fail in practice, leading to costly loops, false trips, and blocked work. The authors identify two cross‑cutting causes—identity adequacy and evidence adequacy—and propose seven new reliability primitives that enforce reliability at the delegation level.
arXiv:2608. 13867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems.
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.
arXiv:2608.22160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical automation is scaling toward fleets of embodied machines commanded by an AI brain. Early deployments already run factories and warehouses at p...
arXiv:2606. 14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans.
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
FaulT-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 200 network troubleshooting scenarios across eight topologies, designed to test large‑language‑model agents on realistic, noisy user tickets that may contain false premises or incorrect fault claims. The benchmark includes 72 rewritten tickets that vary reporter confidence and detail while keeping the network state constant, allowing isolation of the impact of ticket wording on diagnosis. Evaluation of agents such as SADE, ReAct, and Claude Code shows they perform well on accurate tickets but degrade sharply on misleading or healthy‑network tickets, revealing differing failure modes and highlighting the importance of robust reasoning over unreliable input.
arXiv:2606. 19356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped.
arXiv:2608.22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robustness to a bad tool return means answering it in the way that return calls for, which depends on how the tool went wrong. A tool that has failed a...
arXiv:2607. 11098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents are mostly evaluated assuming all tools work.
arXiv:2607. 00269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs, solvers, and agent teams increasingly generate workflow actions, repairs, and plans, but a generated action may be syntactically valid yet stale, infeasible, conflicting, or destructive of the evidence that triggered a repair.
arXiv:2607. 17044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step enterprise agent tasks fail in a characteristic way: single-pass inference has no checkpoint between deciding an answer and committing to it.
arXiv:2608. 09828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents increasingly work inside systems that govern how they delegate tasks, move information, execute actions, and use shared resources.