Abstract
Rules for AI self-improvement often key on the model itself: has it been retrained, or are its weights frozen? We argue that, for AI coding agents, this check is incomplete, and we propose, but do not run, the experiment that would test it. An agent that keeps revising its own work runs into diminishing returns as long as the set of changes it can reach stays fixed, and can escape them only if that set grows. Our hypothesis is that the set can grow with the model untouched, because the software around the model, its scaffold of tools, tests and task breakdown, can be rewritten. If so, a frozen model guarantees a ceiling eventually but not steady behavior on the way there, and audits should track changes to the scaffold, not only to the model. The same criterion separates three things often lumped together: more search within a fixed setup, retraining the model during use (which can raise the ceiling), and rewriting the scaffold, which sits between them. Adding more agents does not lift the ceiling. Picking the best of several agents' answers reaches the best single agent's ceiling exactly, and only gets there faster. A majority vote could do better, but only if the agents fail on different tasks. In our tests, 30 agents from one model family failed together: some task defeated all of them, and a majority failed 23/55 (42%) of tasks. Our evidence is descriptive. On a public coding benchmark, the gain from each extra round of revision shrinks toward zero, though the unsolved tasks left to measure are also fewer and harder. Across 401 development sessions, the amount of code changed falls off from commit to commit, but programmers working before AI tools show the same pattern, so the data show that current practice levels off without showing why. We reach the criterion by treating repeated revision as a known machine-learning method, boosting, and note where real agents depart from it.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34924
