When Does Restricting a Coding Agent to execute_code Help? A Regime $\times$ Agent-Design Ablation
Modern coding agents expose multiple tool surfaces -- IDE primitives, bash, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) code-execution -- and the field has shipped three contradictory claims about which one matters. We run the missing crossed comparison: an integrity-clean three-arm ablation (baseline / bash_only / code_only) on synthetic computation tasks and SWE-bench Mini modification tasks, holding model, harness, and prompts fixed, with two agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI) so the comparison spans both regime and agent-design axes. Across the four resulting (regime, agent) cells, restricting the agent to a single execute_code MCP tool is cheaper than -- or statistically tied with -- its ch...
| Authors | Hong Yang, Qi Yu, Travis Desell |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 12 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 July 2026 |
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