Builder, Defender, Breaker: Measurable Independence and Bounded Autonomy When Generative Models Build, Defend and Test Software

Abstract

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.