Papers for

ai developers for coding assistants

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Opera improves long code fixes with ongoing verbal feedback

Opera: A Verbal Critic Framework for Long-horizon Coding Agents

Abstract: Long-horizon coding agents need timely corrections, yet feedback can be ineffective or even harmful when it misjudges ongoing work or fails to address the underlying problem. Existing critics focus on evaluating trajectories and generating feedback, but rarely track what happens after feedback is delivered. We present Opera, a verbal critic framework that treats each correction as a persistent note, followed until the diagnosed problem is resolved. Opera decides when to review through periodic and event-driven triggers, diagnoses issues with typed operators, audits feedback against visible evidence before delivery, and tracks the agent's subsequent actions to distinguish mere compliance from actual resolution. As a test-time critic, Opera improves the resolve rate of non-critic agents by up to 12.4, 15.0, and 8.9 percentage points on Terminal-Bench 2.1, a SWE-Bench Pro subset, and DeepSWE v1.1, respectively, across four policy models, and achieves the highest mean resolve rate among competitive critic baselines on all three benchmarks, and also improves policy models when the policy critiques itself. Beyond inference, Opera-guided rollouts provide approximately on-policy training data: fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on them improves its resolve rate on held-out SWE-Bench Pro repositories by 10.2 percentage points without a critic at inference time, matching fine-tuning on rollouts from a stronger model, while preserving its performance when switching harness, i.e., from Openhands to Terminus-2, which the latter substantially degrades.

Sun 27 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Long projects that involve writing code often need timely and helpful corrections, but feedback can sometimes miss the real issues or be given too late. The authors introduce Opera, a system that keeps track of problems verbally and watches whether the coder fixes them, not just whether they follow instructions. Opera reviews work periodically or when triggered by events, checks feedback carefully before giving it, and helps improve code fixing success rates significantly. It also helps train AI coding assistants to work better even without feedback later.
Open → 2609.33987v1