Comment by bob1029
2 hours ago
> Our findings reveal a phenomenon of constraint decay: as structural requirements accumulate, agent performance exhibits a substantial decline.
I have exactly the inverse findings on my end. The bigger and more legacy the codebase, the more accurate the patches become.
The harness itself seems to be the most important part. I use a recursive loop that primes the root context based on the user prompt each time. My agent will often make over 100 tool calls to sql and git before it finally decides to apply a patch. If I was greenfield, there would be nothing to query or constrain against.
I find the same. We have abstractions with multiple concrete implementations, examples of patterns and examples of anti patterns.
I usually find I can achieve 90% of the outcome I'm trying to achieve. I use sonnet for planning, qwen for coding, sonnet for review.
The harness mattering more than the model lines up with my experience too. What this paper measures is within-turn constraint decay. The version that bites in multi-agent setups is across-session — the architectural rules an agent wrote down on Monday don't reach the agent making the next change on Tuesday.