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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.29332 · updated 2026-10-25

Do Coding Agents Understand Why Systems Crash---and Why They Don't?

First page of Do Coding Agents Understand Why Systems Crash---and Why They Don't?
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.29332Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

The method replaces single-version crash prediction benchmarks with paired source trees differing by one commit, so a correct-looking prediction on crashing code alone is no longer accepted as evidence of execution reasoning. It costs the construction of matched pre/post-commit tree pairs with a verified crash-triggering input (934 pairs here from Linux and OSS-Fuzz), plus roughly double the agent evaluation runs per case. It can fail if pairs are not truly minimal, if the crash input is flaky, or if agents refuse or time out on large systems codebases, and it measures crash reasoning only, not general bug-fixing ability.

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What you would change

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Try the idea on your product

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Compare against

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  1. Locate the paper's implementation and check its license, model support, data needs, and hardware requirements. Stop here if you cannot obtain the required artifacts.
  2. Save a small set of representative product tasks and expected outcomes. Keep evaluation tasks out of any training or tuning, and choose quality and cost limits before running.
  3. Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.
  4. Save per-task outputs, failures, timings, and all usage costs. Review regressions before expanding the test.

What to measure

Agreement with human review, missed failures, false alarms, and evaluation cost per task.

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source-linked claims
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Why it was shortlisted

The technical change, research area, and reason it entered the archive.

recommendation
test
research area
agent evaluation
technical change
Paired source-intervention evaluation for crash reasoning
published
2026-10-21

For a team shipping coding agents on large codebases, adopting paired evaluation is a low-cost way to detect suspicious-pattern shortcutting before trusting agent crash or bug triage in production.

About the technical core

Equations have not been fetched yet.

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Claims and evidence

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    The method replaces single-version crash prediction benchmarks with paired source trees differing by one commit, so a correct-looking prediction on crashing code alone is no longer accepted as evidence of execution reasoning. It costs the construction of matched pre/post-commit tree pairs with a verified crash-triggering input (934 pairs here from Linux and OSS-Fuzz), plus roughly double the agent evaluation runs per case. It can fail if pairs are not truly minimal, if the crash input is flaky, or if agents refuse or time out on large systems codebases, and it measures crash reasoning only, not general bug-fixing ability.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Agents exhibit a bias toward predicting no crash: they rarely raise false alarms but miss many real crashes, with the best agent missing over a quarter of them; agents that merely notice suspicious code predict crashes on both trees, so only paired evaluation reveals this failure.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source

Exposure map

Author findings, Paperraft interpretations, and the next check. Missing analysis never counts as evidence of safety.

quality

Still unknown

Which tasks improve, and which regress against the baseline?

compute and memory

Still unknown

What memory, hardware, and total compute does the complete method require?

latency

Still unknown

Are startup time, typical response time, and slow requests measured separately?

operations

Still unknown

What must be monitored, maintained, and rolled back?

software compatibility

Still unknown

Does the implementation support your model, runtime, and hardware?

security

Still unknown

What new data access, permissions, or trust boundaries does it introduce?

data and training

Still unknown

What data preparation or training is required, and is it included in the cost?

reproducibility

Still unknown

Are code, versions, inputs, and evaluation scripts available?

Continue the investigation

A reading guide for agent evaluation.

Editorial prompts, not findings from this paper or a validated test plan. Detailed analysis is still pending for the topics below.

What to inspect

Who grades the outputs? Inspect the rubric, disagreements, and whether the evaluator sees the method's identity.

Plan a fair comparison

Can you apply the same tasks and rubric to the baseline and candidate, then review disagreements by hand?

Questions for adoption

Are the results stable across prompts, languages, and task categories relevant to your product?

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Inside the paper

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-25. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2610.29332

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