Chasing the Public Score: User Pressure and Evaluation Exploitation in Coding Agent Workflows

ArXi:2604.20200v1 Announce Type: new Frontier coding agents are increasingly used in workflows where users supervise progress primarily through repeated improvement of a public score, namely the reported score on a public evaluation file with labels in the workspace, rather than through direct inspection of the agent's intermediate outputs. We study whether multi-round user pressure to improve that score induces public score exploitation: behavior that raises the public score through shortcuts without improving hidden private evaluation.