Skeleton Coding: Program Structure as a Specification for Agents

Abstract

Coding agents are typically provided end-to-end behavioral specifications that the code they produce should satisfy, such as tests and input--output examples. How many such specifications must a developer provide, and which ones, for the agent to produce the developer's intended program? We argue that this cannot be determined a priori, for it depends on the structure of the implementation, which is left to the agent to decide. An agent first commits to a structure---a decomposition into data types, modules, and functions---which fixes a class of candidate programs; behavioral specifications then select a program within that class. A set of tests that suffices for one structure may leave another badly underdetermined, requiring different edge cases or exponentially more examples. Since the structure is chosen by the agent, developers cannot ensure their specification is complete without reverse-engineering it from thousands of lines of generated code. To resolve this, we introduce Skeleton Coding, in which developers jointly specify the structure---in high-level, code-like format---alongside behavioral specifications. Theoretically, we model AI-assisted coding as a control problem, and show that skeletons can reduce exponentially the number of tests developers must supply to steer an agent toward an acceptable program. Empirically, across four models and three benchmarks, the best-performing skeleton specifications reduce mean test error by 48.4% relative to the best end-to-end behavioral specifications. Even when the agent can query a complete reference implementation, adding a skeleton reduces mean test error relatively by up to 27.0%. Skeletons also narrow the average gap between small and large models by about 52.4% while lowering implementation cost by 15--26x, and reduce code erosion by 24.7% on average.