Stephanie Jarmak | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Engineering Reliable Coding Agents: Evaluating and Operating the System Around the Model

AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems. Their reliability depends not only on model capability, but on the harness, execution state, retrieval, memory and state management, permissions, review interfaces, and resource allocation. This monograph examines those boundaries and develops a framework for evaluating and operating coding agents reliably. It synthesizes 164 scholarly works, 100 practitioner records, 29 benchmark records, and 17 author-system case records through a structured multivocal review, targeted update audits, software-engineering coverage analysis, and distributed-systems evidence synthesis. Across this evidence, many apparent model failures originate elsewhere in the system, while improvements at one layer often fail to propagate to end-to-end outcomes. Evaluation and operation are treated as a dependency chain in which weaknesses in task construction, execution environments, retrieval, state management, verification, or observability can invalidate downstream conclusions. The monograph contributes a versioned catalog of 206 reliability records: 193 gated practices, including 56 developed in depth, plus 13 research leads; an evidence ledger; a framework for dependency and repair asymmetry across the agent lifecycle; measurements and failure cases from operated agent systems; runnable evaluation and reliability protocols; and five reusable agent skills with evidence maps. Together, these provide a system-level methodology for distinguishing model capability from infrastructure effects, designing defensible evaluations, and building systems that recover safely when components fail. The review is structured rather than exhaustive, evidence strength varies by topic, and results depend on workload and configuration. The methods record which search lanes were executed, which remain unexecuted, and limits on evidence-grading claims.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Experimenting with Large Language Models and vector embeddings in NASA SciX

Open-source Large Language Models enable projects such as NASA SciX (i.e., NASA ADS) to think out of the box and try alternative approaches for information retrieval and data augmentation, while respecting data copyright and users' privacy. However, when large language models are directly prompted with questions without any context, they are prone to hallucination. At NASA SciX we have developed an experiment where we created semantic vectors for our large collection of abstracts and full-text content, and we designed a prompt system to ask questions using contextual chunks from our system. Based on a non-systematic human evaluation, the experiment shows a lower degree of hallucination and better responses when using Retrieval Augmented Generation. Further exploration is required to design new features and data augmentation processes at NASA SciX that leverages this technology while respecting the high level of trust and quality that the project holds.

cs.CL↗