Engineering Reliable Coding Agents

Engineering Reliable Coding Agents A coding agent can make a locally correct change while the project around it becomes less coherent. Consider a three-session authentication refactor. The first session chooses RS256 and implements token validation. The second session cannot recover that decision, infers HS256 instead, and introduces a conflicting path. The third session resolves the conflict but also rewrites an unrelated password module. Each session can plausibly report success. Taken together, the repository has drifted. ...

May 18, 2026 · 10 min · Zhengyu Chen