{
  "id": 19507,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12440",
  "title": "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",
  "summary": "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",
  "authors": "Joel Abenhaim",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "agents-autonomy",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-08-11T20:00:00.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-08-15T05:10:17.122Z",
  "source_slug": "hf-daily",
  "source_name": "HuggingFace Daily Papers",
  "source_homepage": "https://huggingface.co/papers",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/19507",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12440",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}