SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch

LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks where an existing codebase provides context, but constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. Recent benchmarks such as ProgramBench quantify this gap: given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary as a behavioral oracle, even frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances. Existing frameworks conflate documentation reading, behavioral exploration, and code synthesis into a single pass, causing age

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ethics.ai (28 July 2026), “SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch,” evidence record 14899, https://ethics.ai/record/14899 (originally published by HuggingFace Daily Papers).

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