Assurance Envelopes for Autonomous Coding Agents: Minimum-Cost Evidence for Software Change
When a coding agent returns to existing software, it inherits evidence from earlier engineering work: tests, type checks, proofs, static analyses, and traces. Reloading all of it is wasteful, but dropping a piece the change depends on can leave a required property unsupported. Given the properties a change must preserve, its obligations, we ask which least-cost subset of the available evidence re-establishes them, and we call such a subset a task-conditioned assurance envelope. Evidence and the rules that combine it form a typed inference graph; an obligation is met when forward chaining from the selected evidence reaches it, and we validate every selection by that closure rather than by ...
| Authors | Anjan Goswami |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 14 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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