Specification-first convergence with an AI coding agent: a case study of dismantling a core architectural invariant across 189 files in a 717k-line codebase with no test oracle and no human code review
This paper reports a single, fully instrumented case study of a large-scale architectural refactoring by an AI coding agent under a specification-first protocol, with no human review of the generated code and no pre-existing oracle to validate the target behaviour. The task, dismantling a central invariant across a large interdependent codebase, was assessed by the author as effectively infeasible through incremental refactoring, the kind of change that conventionally calls for a rewrite instead. Under the protocol described here, the agent completed it successfully. The system is a 717,725-line production TypeScript application across 3,648 files. The task required dismantling a core lif...
| Authors | Joel Abenhaim |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 12 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.