Code Generation

Large language models~(LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet their performance remains limited on domain-specific tasks such as Computer-Aided Design~(CAD) code generation, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality training data. In-Context Learning~(ICL) provides a training-free alternative by prompting LLMs with task-specific exemplars, but its effectiveness critically depends on how exemplars are selected. Existing selection strategies mainly rely on similarity or point-wise diversity, often overlooking the compositional nature of CAD design specifications, where a query may involve multiple functional requirements, geometric constraints, and design primitives. As a result, selected exemplars can be individually relevant but collectively redundant, providing insufficient coverage for complex design requirements. In this work, we propose \emph{knowledge sufficiency} as a principled objective for exemplar selection, aiming to select a compact set of exemplars that maximally satisfies the requirements contained in a target design specification. To instantiate this objective, we introduce \emph{Design-Specification Tiling~(DST)}, which estimates knowledge sufficiency through a surrogate tiling ratio by decomposing design specifications into multi-granular components and measuring the proportion of query components covered by selected exemplars. We further show that optimizing this objective can be formulated as a submodular maximization problem, and develop a polynomial-time greedy algorithm tailored to this setting with a $(1-1/e)$-approximation guarantee. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs demonstrate that DST substantially improves CAD code generation quality and consistently outperforms existing ICL exemplar selection strategies, highlighting the importance of requirement-level knowledge coverage for domain-specific code generation.

Synthetic data has become essential for training code generation models, yet it introduces significant noise and hallucinations that are difficult to detect with current metrics. Existing data selection methods like Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) typically assess how hard a model generates an answer given a query ($A|Q$). However, this metric is ambiguous on noisy synthetic data, where low probability can distinguish between intrinsic task complexity and model-generated hallucinations. Here, we propose QAQ, a novel data selection framework that evaluates data quality from the reverse direction: how well can the answer predict the query ($Q|A$)? We define Reverse Mutual Information (RMI) to quantify the information gain about the query conditioned on the answer. Our analyses reveal that both extremes of RMI signal quality issues: low RMI indicates semantic misalignment, while excessively high RMI may contain defect patterns that LLMs easily recognize. Furthermore, we introduce a selection strategy based on the disagreement between strong and weak models to identify samples that are valid yet challenging. Experiments across three datasets spanning code generation (WarriorCoder, Magpie-Qwen2.5-Coder-Pro-300K) and math reasoning (OpenR1-Math-220k) demonstrate that selecting just 25% of data using stratified RMI matches full-data performance while being consistently competitive with or better than existing data selection methods. Our approach highlights the importance of bidirectional semantic coherence in synthetic data curation, offering a scalable pathway to reduce computational costs without sacrificing model capability. Code is available at https://github.com/XXSg559/QAQ.

Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version.

Accurate time series forecasting underpins decision-making in many domains, yetconventional ML development often faces data scarcity, distribution shift, anddiminishing returns from manual iteration. We propose Self-Evolving Agent forTime Series Algorithms (SEATS), a framework that autonomously generates, val-idates, and optimizes forecasting algorithm code through an iterative self-evolutionloop. Our design combines three mechanisms: (1) Metric-Advantage MCTS(MA-MCTS), which replaces fixed rewards with a statistically normalized advan-tage score for search guidance, (2) code review with running prompt refinement,so every successfully executed solution is reviewed and the running prompt encodescorrective patterns for later iterations, and (3) global steerable reasoning, whichcompares each evaluated node to global best- and worst-performing solutions forcross-trajectory transfer. A MAP-Elites archive maintains architectural diversity.Across four datasets and two metrics, SEATS wins seven of eight comparisonsagainst strong baselines TimeMixer, Timer, and SEMixer

Design-to-code translates high-fidelity UI designs into executable front-end implementations, but progress remains hard to compare due to inconsistent datasets, toolchains, and evaluation protocols. We introduce 1D-Bench, a benchmark grounded in real e-commerce workflows, where each instance provides a reference rendering and an exported intermediate representation that may contain extraction errors. 1D is short for one day, representing the efficient completion of design-to-code tasks in less than one day. Models take both as input, using the intermediate representation as structural cues while being evaluated against the reference rendering, which tests robustness to intermediate representation defects rather than literal adherence. 1D-Bench requires generating an executable React codebase under a fixed toolchain with an explicit component hierarchy, and defines a multi-round setting in which models iteratively apply component-level edits using execution feedback. Experiments on commercial and open-weight multimodal models show that iterative editing generally improves final performance by increasing rendering success and often improving visual similarity. We further conduct a pilot study on post-training with synthetic repair trajectories and reinforcement learning based editing, and observe limited and unstable gains that may stem from sparse terminal rewards and high-variance file-level updates. The data and scripts used in this study are available in an anonymized repository at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/d2c-benchmark-A9C4/.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of capabilities, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and linguistic behaviors. We show that Transformer architectures contain small subsets of attention heads that are necessary for certain capabilities. Zeroing out as few as five task-specific heads can degrade performance by up to $60\%$ on standard benchmarks measuring the capability of interest, while largely preserving performance on unrelated tasks. We introduce a compressed sensing-based method that exploits the sparsity of these heads to identify them via strategic knockouts and a small number of model evaluations. We validate these findings across Llama and Qwen models ranging from 1B to 14B parameters and a diverse set of capabilities including mathematical abilities and code generation, revealing a modular organization in which specialized capabilities are dependent on sparse, functionally distinct components. Overall, our results suggest that capability localization is a general organizational principle of Transformer language models, with implications for interpretability, model editing, and AI safety. Code is released at https://github.com/locuslab/llm-components.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for hardware and firmware code generation, but existing studies primarily evaluate functional correctness while largely overlooking security. However, LLM-generated code that appears functionally sound may embed security flaws which could induce catastrophic damages after deployment. This critical research gap motivates us to design a benchmark for assessing security awareness under realistic specifications. In this work, we introduce HardSecBench, a benchmark with 924 tasks spanning Verilog Register Transfer Level (RTL) and firmware-level C, covering 76 hardware-relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries. Each task includes a structured specification, a secure reference implementation, and executable tests. To automate artifact synthesis, we propose a multi-agent pipeline that decouples synthesis from verification and grounds evaluation in execution evidence, enabling reliable evaluation. We evaluate diverse LLMs and find that they often satisfy functional requirements while leaving security risks. We also find that security results vary with prompting. These findings highlight pressing challenges and offer actionable insights for future advancements in LLM-assisted hardware design. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/chenqirui2002/HardSecBench.

AI coding assistants produce vulnerable code in 45% of security-relevant scenarios~\cite{veracode2025}, yet no public training dataset teaches both traditional web security and AI/ML-specific defenses in a format suitable for instruction tuning. We present SecureCode, a production-grade dataset of 2,185 multi-turn security training examples spanning two domains: web application security (1,435 examples covering the OWASP Top 10 2021 across 11 languages and 9 frameworks, 100% grounded in documented CVEs and security incidents) and AI/ML security (750 examples covering all 10 OWASP LLM Top 10 2025 categories across more than 40 frameworks, including LangChain, OpenAI, and Hugging Face). Every example follows a 4-turn conversational structure -- feature request; vulnerable and secure implementations with attack demonstrations; advanced probing; and defense-in-depth operational guidance -- designed for direct use in instruction tuning pipelines. Quality assurance combines automated structural validation with multi-agent review from seven specialist AI perspectives (more than 10{,}500 assessments) and an 8-phase remediation pipeline, producing a rubric-calibrated mean quality score of 93.8/100 ($σ= 0.93$) for the AI/ML component. Each example provides SIEM integration strategies, infrastructure hardening recommendations, and testing approaches using production frameworks. We release the unified dataset on Hugging Face with domain-specific loading configurations (web, aiml, default), alongside eight fine-tuned open-source models (3B--20B parameters, QLoRA), and an evaluation framework with four security-specific metrics. To our knowledge, SecureCode is the first public dataset that jointly provides OWASP Top 10 2021 web coverage and OWASP LLM Top 10 2025 AI/ML coverage in a unified conversational schema suitable for instruction tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on code translation between widely used programming languages. However, translation becomes much less reliable for domain-specific code, where correctness depends on framework-specific APIs and execution semantics. One example is translating deep-learning code from PyTorch to JAX, where LLM outputs often contain subtle bugs or non-idiomatic usage that prevents execution or changes behavior. Prior work suggests that curated bug-fix data from LLM-generated code can help improve code generation quality, but such resources are still limited for PyTorch-to-JAX translation. In this work, we introduce T2J, a benchmark of LLM translation bugs paired with developer-written fixes for PyTorch-to-JAX code. We start from 20 kernels in the TorchLeet dataset, translate them to JAX using the weak LLM gpt-4o-mini, and hire software developers to debug and repair the generated JAX implementations. We then use T2J to improve PyTorch-to-JAX translation for the weak LLM gpt-4o-mini via in-context learning. Our evaluation shows that using T2J yields up to 20% improvement of our proposed metric T2J-CodeTrans-Score.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside implementation. With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), developers can shift from manually writing the code to defining tests as executable specifications and delegating code synthesis to AI agents. However, enabling repository-level TDD under developer-written tests is challenging, requiring: (1) specification enhancement: identifying a concise yet representative test subset from large suites with rich task semantics; (2) retrieval augmentation: using tests to guide reasoning and context retrieval; and (3) test-driven refinement: interpreting test feedback for iterative improvement. We propose TENET, an agentic framework for repository-level code generation under the TDD paradigm. TENET includes: (1) a test harness mechanism that selects a concise test suite to maximize diversity of the target usage scenarios; (2) a tailored agent toolset for efficient retrieval and debugging; and (3) a reflection-based refinement workflow that iteratively analyzes failures and updates implementations. TENET consistently outperforms the strongest baselines across backbones, achieving 69.08% and 81.77% Pass@1 on RepoCod and RepoEval with Claude Sonnet 4, improving by 9.49 and 2.17 percentage points, respectively. Additionally, we present the first systematic study of how test suite characteristics influence LLM agent performance in TDD settings.

API integration is a cornerstone of our digital infrastructure, enabling software systems to connect and interact. However, as shown by many studies, writing or generating correct code to invoke APIs, particularly web APIs, is challenging. Although large language models (LLMs) have become popular in software development, their effectiveness in automating the generation of web API integration code remains unexplored. In order to address this, we present WAPIIBench, a dataset and evaluation pipeline designed to assess the ability of LLMs to generate web API invocation code. Our experiments with several open-source LLMs reveal that generating API invocations poses a significant challenge, resulting in hallucinated endpoints, incorrect argument usage, and other errors. None of the evaluated open-source models was able to solve more than 40% of the tasks.

Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated exceptional performance in UI2Code tasks, significantly enhancing website development efficiency. However, these tasks incur substantially higher computational overhead than traditional code generation due to the large number of input image tokens and extensive output code tokens required. Our comprehensive study identifies significant redundancies in both image and code tokens that exacerbate computational complexity and hinder focus on key UI elements, resulting in excessively lengthy and often invalid HTML files. We propose EfficientUICoder, a compression framework for efficient UI code generation with three key components. First, Element and Layout-aware Token Compression preserves essential UI information by detecting element regions and constructing UI element trees. Second, Region-aware Token Refinement leverages attention scores to discard low-attention tokens from selected regions while integrating high-attention tokens from unselected regions. Third, Adaptive Duplicate Token Suppression dynamically reduces repetitive generation by tracking HTML/CSS structure frequencies and applying exponential penalties. Extensive experiments show EfficientUICoder achieves a 55%-60% compression ratio without compromising webpage quality and delivers superior efficiency improvements: reducing computational cost by 44.9%, generated tokens by 41.4%, prefill time by 46.6%, and inference time by 48.8% on 34B-level MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/WebPAI/EfficientUICoder.

Qualitative content analysis of open-ended survey responses is a commonly used research method in science education. However, traditional coding approaches are often time-consuming and prone to inconsistency, especially when applied to large datasets. Existing solutions from Natural Language Processing such as supervised classifiers, topic modeling techniques, and generative large language models have limited applicability in analysis of open-ended survey responses, since they demand extensive labeled data, disrupt established qualitative workflows, and/or yield variable results. In this paper, we introduce a text embedding-based classification framework called Deductive Semantic Content Analysis (DeSCA) that requires only a handful of examples per category to run, is transparent and replicable, and fits well with standard qualitative workflows. When benchmarked against human analysis of a physics education survey consisting of 2899 open-ended responses, the method described by our framework achieves high agreement with expert human coders across ten embeddings models on a simulated exhaustive coding task, using approximately 1-2% of the total dataset for training. The method achieves lower agreement on a complete selective coding task; this performance, however, improves with fine-tuning of the text embedding model, which can be done with a small amount of additional data. We unpack these results in terms of the theoretical assumptions of text embeddings, and further demonstrate how embeddings can be used to audit previously-analyzed datasets for coding consistency. These findings demonstrate that text embedding-assisted coding can flexibly scale to thousands of responses without sacrificing interpretability, opening avenues for deductive qualitative analysis at scale.

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is growing in the productive completion of Software Engineering tasks. Yet, studies investigating productive prompting techniques often employed a limited problem space, focusing primarily on well-known prompting patterns and targeting function-level SE practices. We identify significant gaps in real-world workflows that involve complexities beyond class-level (e.g., multi-class dependencies) and different features that can impact Human-LLM Interaction (HLI) processes in code generation. To address these issues, we designed an experiment to comprehensively analyze HLI features related to code generation productivity. Our study presents two project-level benchmark tasks that extend beyond function-level evaluations. We conducted a user study with 36 participants from diverse backgrounds, asking them to solve the assigned tasks by interacting with the GPT assistant using specific prompting patterns. We also examined participants' experiences and behavioral features during interactions by analyzing screen recordings and GPT chat logs. Our empirical investigation, based on statistical guidance, revealed (1) that three out of 15 HLI features emerged as consistently supported factors for productivity; (2) five primary guidelines for enhancing productivity for HLI processes; and (3) a taxonomy of 29 runtime and logic errors that can occur during HLI processes, along with suggested mitigation plans.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation (i.e., Code LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in AI-assisted software development and testing. However, recent studies have shown that these models are prone to generating vulnerable or even malicious code under adversarial settings. Existing red-teaming approaches rely on extensive human effort, limiting their scalability and practicality, and generally overlook the interactive nature of real-world AI-assisted programming, which often unfolds over multiple turns. To bridge these gaps, we present RedCoder, a red-teaming agent that engages victim models in multi-turn conversation to elicit vulnerable code. The pipeline to construct RedCoder begins with a multi-agent gaming process that simulates adversarial interactions, yielding a set of prototype conversations and an arsenal of reusable attack strategies. We then fine-tune an LLM on these prototype conversations to serve as the backbone of RedCoder. Once deployed, RedCoder autonomously engages Code LLMs in multi-turn conversations, dynamically retrieving relevant strategies from the arsenal to steer the dialogue toward vulnerability-inducing outputs. Experiments across multiple Code LLMs show that our approach outperforms prior single-turn and multi-turn red-team methods in inducing vulnerabilities in code generation, offering a scalable and effective tool for evaluating the security boundaries of modern code-generation systems.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks. Their performance on certain tasks can be further enhanced by incorporating test-time reasoning techniques. These inference-time advances have been adopted into the code domain, enabling complex software engineering (SWE) tasks such as code generation, test generation and issue resolution. However, the impact of different reasoning techniques on code-centric SWE tasks has not been systematically explored. In this work, we survey code reasoning techniques that underpin these capabilities, with a focus on test-time compute and inference-time reasoning paradigms. We examine a variety of code-specific reasoning methods and progressively build up to SWE agents, which combine planning, tool use, and multi-step interaction. We also compare the impact of different techniques on coding tasks, highlighting their relative importance and outlining open challenges and future research directions. Across commonly used models and benchmarks, we find that approaches exploiting code-specific signals (e.g., structure and execution feedback) are frequently associated with improved performance, motivating a dedicated study of code reasoning beyond natural-language reasoning.

We introduce BigO(Bench), a novel coding benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of generative language models in understanding and generating code with specified time and space complexities. This benchmark addresses the gap in current evaluations that often overlook the ability of models to comprehend and produce code constrained by computational complexity. BigO(Bench) includes tooling to infer the algorithmic complexity of any Python function from profiling measurements, including human- or LLM-generated solutions. BigO(Bench) also includes of set of 3,105 coding problems and 1,190,250 solutions from Code Contests annotated with inferred (synthetic) time and space complexity labels from the complexity framework, as well as corresponding runtime and memory footprint values for a large set of input sizes. We present results from evaluating multiple state-of-the-art language models on this benchmark, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in handling complexity requirements. In particular, token-space reasoning models are unrivaled in code generation but not in complexity understanding, hinting that they may not generalize well to tasks for which no reward was given at training time.

Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) are foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) for text generation. However, individual LLMs often produce inconsistent outputs and exhibit biases, limiting their representation of diverse language patterns. The closed-source nature of many powerful LLMs further restricts industry applications due to data privacy concerns. Inspired by successes in text generation, LLM ensemble techniques are now increasingly explored for code generation. This article reviews these emerging ensemble approaches to enhance understanding, encourage further research, and promote practical implementation in both text and code generation. We categorize LLM ensembles into seven main methods - weight merging, knowledge fusion, mixture-of-experts, reward ensemble, output ensemble, routing, and cascading - analyzing capabilities of those approaches. Our findings highlight key benefits such as improved diversity representation, enhanced output quality, and greater application flexibility. These insights aid model selection for real-world tasks and crucially, lay groundwork for extending ensemble strategies to multimodal LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in automated code generation, with few-shot prompting widely used for its simplicity and effectiveness. However, few-shot methods depend on curated or manually crafted reference examples, limiting their applicability in data-free coding scenarios such as real-world data-free coding scenarios and benchmarks without training sets. Existing methods that generate reference examples via recitation or analogy cannot guarantee their authenticity or accuracy. Inspired by human metamemory, we propose a novel metamemory agent to enhance one-time code generation in data-free coding scenarios. The agent guides LLMs to recall relevant prior knowledge, evaluate confidence in recalled information, and selectively exploit reliable content for problem solving. This agent removes the need for external reference examples, improves the authenticity and accuracy of recalled knowledge, and adaptively tailors the recall&evaluation process to each task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed metamemory agent significantly improves one-time code generation quality across data-free coding scenarios. The AI contribution is the metamemory agent, which makes self-recalled examples reliable through confidence evaluation and selection; the engineering application is data-free automated code generation, validated on eight public benchmarks.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in automating the scientific research ideation. Existing approaches primarily focus on prompting techniques, often producing ideas misaligned with expert standards - novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness, which are widely recognized by the research community as the three key subdimensions of high-quality ideas. Also, balancing these dimensions remains challenging due to their inherent trade-offs. To address these limitations, we propose the first framework that employs a two-stage approach combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and controllable Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the task. In the SFT stage, the model learns foundational patterns from pairs of research papers and their corresponding follow-up ideas. In the RL stage, multi-dimensional reward models guided by fine-grained feedback evaluate and optimize the model across key dimensions. During inference, dimensional controllers coordinated by a sentence-level decoder enable dynamic context-aware steering of the idea generation process. Our framework provides a balanced approach to research idea generation, achieving high-quality outcomes in the experiment by dynamically navigating the trade-offs among novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program synthesis, yet they often generate code that is functionally plausible but insecure. Progress in secure code generation has been hindered by benchmarks that are small, non-executable, leak mitigation details, or rely on noisy analyzers and subjective judgments, making it difficult to measure whether security improves without sacrificing correctness. We address these gaps with CodeSecEval, an execution-based benchmark for secure code generation, comprising 255 Python tasks spanning 77 CWE categories. Each task provides paired insecure and secure implementations together with executable functional and vulnerability-targeted security tests, enabling precise and reproducible evaluation of secure code generation and insecure-code repair. Building on CodeSecEval, we propose SecAwareCoder, an agent-based framework that shifts code generation toward secure-by-construction synthesis. SecAwareCoder performs task-adaptive threat modeling to identify security-sensitive regions and derive task-grounded vulnerability hypotheses, uses these hypotheses to guide both constraint-aware code generation and security-aware test synthesis, and leverages execution feedback for targeted refinement. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones show that SecAwareCoder consistently improves Pass@1 and security robustness over prompting and analyzer-driven baselines, narrowing the security--correctness gap in LLM code generation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with reliably generating highly structured outputs, such as program code, mathematical formulas, or well-formed markup. Constrained decoding approaches mitigate this problem by greedily restricting what tokens an LLM can output at each step to guarantee that the output matches a given constraint. Specifically, in grammar-constrained decoding (GCD), the LLM's output must follow a given grammar. In this paper, we demonstrate that GCD techniques (and in general constrained decoding techniques) can distort the LLM's distribution, leading to outputs that are grammatical but appear with likelihoods that are not proportional to the ones given by the LLM, and so ultimately are low-quality. We call the problem of aligning sampling with a grammar constraint, grammar-aligned decoding (GAD), and propose adaptive sampling with approximate expected futures (ASAp), a decoding algorithm that guarantees the output to be grammatical while provably producing outputs that match the conditional probability of the LLM's distribution conditioned on the given grammar constraint. Our algorithm uses prior sample outputs to soundly overapproximate the future grammaticality of different output prefixes. Our evaluation on code generation and structured NLP tasks shows how ASAp often produces outputs with higher likelihood (according to the LLM's distribution) than existing GCD techniques, while still enforcing the desired grammatical constraints.

Generative models now write application code, harden and monitor it, and probe it for exploitable flaws, so that one family of models increasingly plays builder, defender and breaker at once. The prevailing view treats full autonomy as the natural end point of assistance. This article argues for a narrower and more defensible position than a blanket requirement for human oversight. We define the shared generative substrate as the set of upstream dependencies (training corpus, model family, alignment procedure, vendor, toolchain) that induce correlated errors, and we define independence as a measurable property of pairs of lifecycle roles rather than an attribute of any participant. A coincident-failure model in the tradition of Eckhardt and Lee shows why organisational independence, the proxy on which verification standards have relied, no longer implies statistical independence once roles share a substrate; it also shows that heterogeneous models, deterministic analysers and formal verification can restore independence for the fault classes they cover. What remains for humans is specific: authority over the specification against which every machine oracle is judged, accountability that current governance instruments do not permit to be delegated, and last-resort authority to halt. We translate this into an operational framework with five autonomy levels, three distinct human roles and five decision criteria (consequence, reversibility, time-criticality, verifiability and adversarial exposure), apply it to build, defend and test actions, and specify how independence and oversight effectiveness can be measured. The central claims are stated as testable hypotheses with a protocol for refuting them.

Language generation is almost universally treated as a sequential process: autoregressive models emit one token at a time, while diffusion language models replace token-level seriality with a long trajectory of iterative refinement. In this work, we introduce PlaidQ, a 0.7B continuous diffusion language model for code generation, and show that its trajectory can be aggressively distilled into only a few denoising steps---or even one, enabling efficient code generation. PlaidQ repurposes a pretrained autoregressive model as a bidirectional denoiser over continuous token embeddings. We distill PlaidQ with distribution matching for few-step generation and paired-trajectory supervision for one-step generation. At matched model scale, PlaidQ is competitive with discrete diffusion language models on code generation. Distillation then shifts the quality--compute frontier: a 16-step student reaches 31.78 and 40.49 pass@10 on HumanEval and MBPP+, surpassing the same PlaidQ teacher sampled for 512 steps. At the extreme, paired-trajectory distillation achieves 7.07 pass@1 on HumanEval with a single denoising step, producing functionally correct programs. Together, these results establish continuous diffusion as a viable path to few-step and one-step code generation. Broadly, continuous diffusion is not merely another representation for language: it provides an interface through which language models can inherit the acceleration and distillation machinery of continuous diffusion modeling. Training and inference code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/pengzhangzhi/plaidq.