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The reach of a verification tool decides its value: A controlled study of verification surface, artifact quality, and cost in AI coding agents

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 28, 2026 · UTC

Modern artificial-intelligence coding agents can be equipped with tools for checking their own work e.g. a linter, a boot probe, a shell, a screenshot tool. We call this set the agent's verification surface. This study asks whether increasing only that surface, with everything else held fixed, produces a matching growth in the quality of the software the agent ships. We built a minimal coding agent whose tool list is the single controlled variable and used it to implement 1,116 web applications across six models and eight tool configurations. A condition-blind human graded every application ag

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