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The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards

arxiv.org · 18,982 words · saved by 1 readers

A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one. For today’s coding agents, this intuition is being inverted: as foundation models develop stronger reasoning capabilities and engineering harnesses grow more sophisticated, generating complex candidate solutions is no longer difficult—reliably verifying them has become the harder problem. Every verifier we can build is only a proxy for human intent, never the intent itself. This makes verification subject to a twofold difficulty: first, intent is underspecified by nature, making it inherently hard to faithfully check whether it has been fulfilled; second, during model training, optimization widens the gap between proxy and intent—manifesting as reward hacking or signal saturation. To address this, we characterize the quality of verification signals along three dimensions—scalability, faithfulness, and robustness—and argue that achieving all three simultaneously is the central challenge. We further study

\useunder \ul The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards Qwen Team Abstract A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one. For today’s coding agents, this intuition is being inverted: as foundation models develop stronger reasoning capabilities and engineering harnesses grow more sophisticated, generating complex candidate solutions is no longer difficult—reliably verifying them has become the harder problem. Every verifier we can build is only a proxy for human intent, never the intent itself. This makes verification subject to a t

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