Rebuild Dossier: Mechanically-Enforced Specs for Agentic App Rebuilds, and What Model-Tier Failures Reveal
An AI agent's rebuild is only as good as the process that produced it. Prior work found that once a model is strong enough, a multi-agent rebuild pipeline loses to the simplest approach: giving the model the original code and one instruction (AgentModernize). We present rebuild-dossier, an open-source tool that locks an application's real interface - its exact inputs and outputs - before any code is written, then enforces one-test-at-a-time building through automated checks, not written instructions alone. Three results shape this evaluation, with differing amounts of evidence. First, in a small comparison, the compliant agent failed a held-back test while the rule-breaking agent passed e...
| Authors | Parker Fawcett |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 22 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 September 2026 |
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