The Working Set of a Coding Agent: Coherence Debt in Repository-Scale Tasks
Repository-scale coding requires an agent to keep tests, imports, configuration, and migration rules consistent within a bounded context window. We model this as reconstructing a coupled-fact graph: at each edit, a required fact comes from recent context or parametric memory, and the facts covered by neither form coherence debt. We supply and withhold each channel and inject faults across seven models and five harnesses. As expected, no model completes a task on an unseen API with both channels empty, and putting the facts in the prompt restores success. When a rename defeats what models memorized about a real library, all seven fail in the same place, passing and missing the same tests. ...
| Authors | Bardia Mohammadi, Lars Klein, Aman Chadha et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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