SpecFirst Framework: Agents Write Specs First, Boosting Code Synthesis by 21%
centre-for-swe · hf · 2026-07-31
While LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks within existing codebases, constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. On benchmarks like ProgramBench, frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances when given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary.
To address this, researchers introduced SpecFirst, a two-stage framework inspired by classical requirements engineering:
- Specification Elicitation Phase: A dedicated agent probes the binary and combines observations with documentation to generate a structured specification.
- Code Synthesis Phase: A code synthesis agent uses this specification to drive implementation.
This decomposition resolves documentation ambiguities before coding begins. Evaluated on 200 ProgramBench instances, SpecFirst consistently outperforms single-loop baselines, improving test pass rates by 6.9%-21.3% and binary exploration coverage by 9.4%-18.5%.
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