A monograph says coding-agent reliability is a system property, and gives a minimum audit

The 314-page review says it synthesizes 164 scholarly works, 100 practitioner records, 29 benchmark records and 17 records from systems the author operates, and catalogs 206 reliability records. It states its central claim in one line: "Coding agents are evaluated as models and deployed as production systems." Its argument is a dependency chain from measurement through grading, containment and recovery, retrieval and context, review, and cost allocation, where a weakness upstream can pass as a clean score downstream. The author states that evidence strength varies by topic and that the review is structured rather than exhaustive.

For an existing setup, the paper proposes a minimum pass. Run a cheap baseline and the candidate on identical task versions, three times per item at first. Record success, cost, latency, model, harness, prompt, permissions and pricing separately. Exercise one permitted and one prohibited action, verify one recent completion claim from repository state, and read twenty failed or unverifiable runs, labeling the first upstream failure in each.

We read the abstract and the introduction, including the method and contributions sections. We did not review the chapters, the measurements from the author's own systems, or the companion repository, so none of the paper's numbers or protocols are checked here.

Why it matters: If you gate agent output on a pass rate, the paper's checklist is a cheap way to test whether that number means anything: rerun the same tasks, split cost from success, and read the failures. Treat its quantitative claims as the author's until someone reproduces them.