ContextCov: Deriving and Enforcing Executable Constraints from Agent Instruction Files

Autonomous coding agents now resolve a substantial share of real-world GitHub issues. However, passing functional tests differs fundamentally from producing a high-quality contribution acceptable for merging. Mature open-source projects publish repository-specific contribution policies, spanning style, git, testing workflows, to ensure code quality and long-term maintainability. Because existing benchmarks evaluate patches solely on unit tests, agent compliance with repository governance remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce SWE-CC, a benchmark evaluating code and process compliance in autonomous software engineering. We develop a semi-automated pipeline that converts developer documentation across 12 open-source repositories into 823 machine-checkable atomic policies. SWE-CC introduces two features: 1) lightweight, deterministic checker functions that represent each policy, 2) a comprehensive auditing mechanism that inspects both agent runtime behaviors and final deliverables. We evaluate the compliance of agent workflows in 500 end-to-end software contribution tasks extended from SWE-bench Verified. Our evaluation of four LLMs under two agent scaffolds shows that modern agents suffer from coding compliance issues: although agents produce functionally correct patches, they still violate 43.1 percent of applicable project policies, with nearly half of all violations occurring during intermediate execution steps. These results show that functional correctness does not guarantee real-world readiness, highlighting that future software engineering agents must reliably conform to repository governance to enable safe and trustworthy deployment.

Large language models generate plausible code but cannot verify correctness. Existing multi-agent systems simulate execution or leave verification optional. We introduce execution-grounded verification as a first-class principle: every code change must survive sandboxed execution before propagation. We instantiate this principle in AGENTFORGE, a multi-agent framework where Planner, Coder, Tester, Debugger, and Critic agents coordinate through shared memory and a mandatory Docker sandbox. We formalize software engineering with LLMs as an iterative decision process over repository states, where execution feedback provides a stronger supervision signal than next-token likelihood. AGENTFORGE achieves 40.0% resolution on SWE-BENCH Lite, outperforming single-agent baselines by 26--28 points. Ablations confirm that execution feedback and role decomposition each independently drive performance. The framework is open-source at https://github.com/raja21068/AutoCodeAI.

An LLM agent acts on the world by emitting actions: shell commands to run, edits to apply. A wrong action does not always fail loudly; it can fail silently, producing a plausible but incorrect effect that raises no error. We argue that a cheap deterministic check, run before an action takes effect, is an effective and underused form of agent oversight, and we study it across two action modalities in one framework. The idea is to fix an action's correct effect by construction, before any executor runs, so that silent failure is measured directly and the verifier may abstain rather than guess. For shell commands, a static verifier over 9930 commands and 482 tools catches 95.8% of invalid commands at a 10.0% false-positive rate. Its syntax and binary checks are oracle-exact, giving zero false positives while catching half of all errors; the flag check is bounded only by help-text coverage and accounts for every false positive. For code edits, a benchmark of 640 edits over 224 files isolating the apply step exposes a sharp split. Content-anchored formats such as search/replace and diff fail cleanly, whereas location-anchored formats fail silently: line numbers corrupt 99.1% of files under a one-line shift, and function-name edits hit the wrong function 12.7% of the time. In both settings a refuse-when-unsure policy turns silent failures into recoverable ones at a tunable cost in applicability: selective grounding reaches 0.958 recall at 7.0% false positives, and an anchor-and-verify applier records one silent misapplication in 8320 trials (0.01%). We release both benchmarks, the verifiers, and the guards.