SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.27167v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks where an existing codebase provides context, but constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. Recent benchmarks such as ProgramBench quantify this gap: given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary as a behavioral oracle, even frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances. Existing frameworks conflate documentation reading, behavioral exploration, and code synthesis into a single pass, causing agents to probe insufficiently, lose behavioral intent as context drifts, and propagate early misinterpretations into the final implementation. Inspired by classical requirements engineering, we argue that behavioral specification elicitation should be