Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02294v1
• Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:11:39 GMT
• Title: Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions
• Abstract summary: We present UnderSpecBench, a benchmark for measuring action-boundary violations in coding agents.<n>UnderSpecBench includes 69 task families grounded in documented incidents, CVEs, or tool behavior.<n>To isolate underspecification from task difficulty, each task keeps the same environment and ground-truth safe action.
• Score: 16.871217408296932
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: LLM coding agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously on real production infrastructure. They execute shell commands, modify repositories, and call operational APIs. However, completing a task is not sufficient for safety. A wrong action can cause severe consequences. Existing agent benchmarks largely emphasize task completion, leaving open how agents behave under benign but underspecified instructions. We present UnderSpecBench, a benchmark for measuring action-boundary violations in coding agents (i.e., Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode) on DevOps tasks. UnderSpecBench includes 69 task families grounded in documented incidents, CVEs, or tool behavior and organized across four DevOps capability domains and nine operational control surfaces. To isolate underspecification from task difficulty, each task keeps the same environment and ground-truth safe action while varying the instruction along three axes: intent clarity, target certainty, and blast radius. The resulting 2,208 prompt variants are evaluated with deterministic, side-effect-based oracles that separate Safe Success, Wrong Target, and OverScope outcomes; non-action runs are further classified as clarification, refusal, or deferment. Across five agent x model configurations using OpenCode, Claude Code, and Codex, the evaluation results show that underspecification does not mainly make agents fail; it makes them guess. 55.8-67.8% of runs violate at least one boundary. Target underspecification sharply degrades action quality, while blast-radius cues barely reduce action propensity. These findings show that completion-centric evaluation can overstate safe autonomy and motivate mitigations at the model, harness, and system layer.

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