Paper
Bootstrapping Coding Agents: The Specification Is the Program
Authors
Martin Monperrus
Abstract
A coding agent can bootstrap itself. Starting from a 926-word specification and a first implementation produced by an existing agent (Claude Code), a newly generated agent re-implements the same specification correctly from scratch. This reproduces, in the domain of AI coding agents, the classical bootstrap sequence known from compiler construction, and instantiates the meta-circular property known from Lisp. The result carries a practical implication: the specification, not the implementation, is the stable artifact of record. Improving an agent means improving its specification; the implementation is, in principle, regenerable at any time.
Metadata
Related papers
Vibe Coding XR: Accelerating AI + XR Prototyping with XR Blocks and Gemini
Ruofei Du, Benjamin Hersh, David Li, Nels Numan, Xun Qian, Yanhe Chen, Zhongy... • 2026-03-25
Comparing Developer and LLM Biases in Code Evaluation
Aditya Mittal, Ryan Shar, Zichu Wu, Shyam Agarwal, Tongshuang Wu, Chris Donah... • 2026-03-25
The Stochastic Gap: A Markovian Framework for Pre-Deployment Reliability and Oversight-Cost Auditing in Agentic Artificial Intelligence
Biplab Pal, Santanu Bhattacharya • 2026-03-25
Retrieval Improvements Do Not Guarantee Better Answers: A Study of RAG for AI Policy QA
Saahil Mathur, Ryan David Rittner, Vedant Ajit Thakur, Daniel Stuart Schiff, ... • 2026-03-25
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Self-Check for LLM Hallucination
Zhuo Li, Yupeng Zhang, Pengyu Cheng, Jiajun Song, Mengyu Zhou, Hao Li, Shujie... • 2026-03-25
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17399v1</id>\n <title>Bootstrapping Coding Agents: The Specification Is the Program</title>\n <updated>2026-03-18T06:21:06Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17399v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17399v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>A coding agent can bootstrap itself. Starting from a 926-word specification and a first implementation produced by an existing agent (Claude Code), a newly generated agent re-implements the same specification correctly from scratch. This reproduces, in the domain of AI coding agents, the classical bootstrap sequence known from compiler construction, and instantiates the meta-circular property known from Lisp. The result carries a practical implication: the specification, not the implementation, is the stable artifact of record. Improving an agent means improving its specification; the implementation is, in principle, regenerable at any time.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.SE'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.LG'/>\n <published>2026-03-18T06:21:06Z</published>\n <arxiv:comment>To appear in IEEE Software</arxiv:comment>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.SE'/>\n <author>\n <name>Martin Monperrus</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}