arXiv AI

Reasoning effort, not tool access, buys first-try reliability in agentic code generation: an observational study

arXiv:2607. 02436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic coding assistants are increasingly given extra capabilities, such as browser based testing tools and design oriented system prompts, on the assumption that more capability yields better software.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

A Study of the Reliability of Agentic AI-Generated Programs

The paper investigates the reliability of software produced by agentic AI by comparing AI-generated versions of ten well-known Linux utilities to their human-written counterparts. Using fuzz testing (both black-box and coverage-guided AFL++), the authors find that AI-generated code is often as reliable or more reliable than the latest human versions, with fewer memory errors but a higher incidence of hangs. The study emphasizes that robust AI-generated software requires careful prompting, skilled human oversight, and that the AI workflow can serve as a cost-effective specification for sustainable code.

By Ayesha Shafique, Barton P. MIller, Elisa R. Heymann
arXiv AI
Sep 11

AgentAudit: An Open, Extensible Framework for Full-Lifecycle Trust Evaluation of AI Agents

AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.

By Shrey Nag, Sachita, Abhishek Kumar Singh, Lipi Goel, Rajeshwar Singh Janwar
arXiv AI
2d ago

From Proposal to Verified Effect: Praxa, an Evidence-Bound Harness for Governed AI Agent Execution

Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit. whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."

By Stefan G. Creadore
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rebuild Dossier: Mechanically-Enforced Specs for Agentic App Rebuilds, and What Model-Tier Failures Reveal

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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Recursive Agentic Reasoning

The paper proposes a unified framework for test‑time reasoning methods, framing them as recursion operators—GROW, PRUNE, and BRANCH—applied to an agent’s reasoning trace. Experiments across five benchmarks and three frontier models show that BRANCH, which samples and selects among multiple reasoning paths, consistently outperforms the other operators and a single‑pass chain‑of‑thought baseline, improving accuracy by an average of 5.98 percentage points. The study also highlights the importance of paired evaluation and careful handling of scoring‑pipeline failures, as these factors can significantly alter comparative outcomes.

By Shengxin Zhang, Xiaomin Wu, Xiyang Wu, Jing Xie
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality

arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.

By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan