Steerability via constraints: a substrate for scalable oversight of coding agents
Coding agents are capable; human oversight is the bottleneck. Unconstrained agents introduce security risks, erode codebase scalability, and make human review increasingly costly. We argue that the same methods used for decades to manage large human engineering teams: access control, network policies, strict coding conventions enforced by tooling; transfer directly to coding agents, and are cheaper (in token) than recent agentic scaffolding. We sketch a start-to-end system on this principle, and report a controlled experiment in scalable oversight: a small reviewer (Gemma 4 e4b) inspects a Python codebase containing 11 inserted backdoors. Recall rises from 54.5% (unconstrained, no tools) ...
| Authors | Thomas Winninger |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 2 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 July 2026 |
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