Specification-first convergence with an AI coding agent: a case study of dismantling a core architectural invariant across 189 files in a 717k-line codebase with no test oracle and no human code review

This paper reports a single, fully instrumented case study of a large-scale architectural refactoring by an AI coding agent under a specification-first protocol, with no human review of the generated code and no pre-existing oracle to validate the target behaviour. The task, dismantling a central invariant across a large interdependent codebase, was assessed by the author as effectively infeasible through incremental refactoring, the kind of change that conventionally calls for a rewrite instead

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ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “Specification-first convergence with an AI coding agent: a case study of dismantling a core architectural invariant across 189 files in a 717k-line codebase with no test oracle and no human code review,” evidence record 19507, https://ethics.ai/record/19507 (originally published by HuggingFace Daily Papers).

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