The Working Set of a Coding Agent: Coherence Debt in Repository-Scale Tasks

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.16630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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 com