coding agents news, stories and analysis

Four benchmark tasks shown as paired bars comparing automated pass/fail scores with AgentLens trajectory review scores. SWE-bench drops from 34 to 19 percent, HumanEval from 71 to 52 percent, BigCodeBench from 28 to 9 percent, and LiveCodeBench from 41 to 26 percent. The coding agent evaluation gap is widest on BigCodeBench.

AgentLens cuts coding agent scores in half on review

AgentLens is a trajectory review framework for coding agent evaluation that scores the full agent process, not just whether tests pass. Agent success rates drop 30 to 60 percent under trajectory review, meaning production readiness is roughly half the benchmark headline.

Lars Cornelissen · Jul 9, 2026

Bar chart of LLM hallucination rates for repository identifiers: 0.9 percent for pre-2019 repos, 85 percent for popular repos, and 92.4 percent for 2025 repos. The attack targets AI coding agents like Cursor and Copilot.

Engineering

HalluSquatting turns AI coding agents into a botnet

HalluSquatting is a pull-based prompt-injection attack that exploits LLM hallucinations of repository names. Coding agents hallucinate up to 92 percent of newer repo identifiers, letting attackers squat those names and ship reverse shells at scale.

Lars Cornelissen · Jul 8, 2026

Coding agent rewards chart showing clean resolved rising from 40.22 percent to 60.53 percent and hacked resolved falling from 28.57 percent to 0.56 percent.

Research

Coding agent rewards hit a harder verification horizon

Coding agent rewards are now a verification problem: Qwen cut hacked SWE passes from 28.57% to 0.56% with monitoring.

Lars Cornelissen · Jun 26, 2026

VS Code Autopilot default risk shown through 2025 developer environment usage: Visual Studio Code at 75.9 percent, Visual Studio at 29 percent, Notepad++ at 27.4 percent, IntelliJ IDEA at 27.1 percent, and Vim at 24.3 percent.

AI

VS Code Autopilot puts agent risk in every default

VS Code Autopilot is now enabled by default, giving coding agents more autonomy. Treat the new default as a policy change, not a shortcut.

Lars Cornelissen · Jun 12, 2026