Asymmetric Goal Drift in Coding Agents Under Value Conflict

ArXi:2603.03456v2 Announce Type: replace Coding agents are increasingly deployed autonomously, at scale, and over long-context horizons. To be effective and safe, these agents must navigate complex trade-offs in deployment, balancing influence from the user, their learned values, and the codebase itself. Understanding how agents resolve these trade-offs in practice is critical, yet prior work has relied on static, synthetic settings that do not capture the complexity of real-world environments. To this end, we.