Theory of Code Space: Do Code Agents Understand Software Architecture?
AI code agents excel at isolated tasks yet struggle with multi-file software engineering requiring architectural understanding. We introduce Theory of Code Space (ToCS), a benchmark that evaluates whether agents can construct, maintain, and update coherent architectural beliefs during codebase exploration. Agents explore procedurally generated codebases under partial observability -- opening files under a budget -- and periodically externalize their belief state as structured JSON, producing a time-series of architectural understanding. Three findings emerge from experiments with four baselines and six frontier LLMs. First, the Active-Passive Gap is model-dependent: one model builds bette...
| Authors | Grigory Sapunov |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 28 February 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 March 2026 |
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