Coding agent paper says verification is now the bottleneck

A new cs.AI paper, “The Verification Horizon,” argues that the old intuition that checking a solution is easier than producing it is breaking down for coding agents.

As models and engineering harnesses improve, agents can generate complex candidate solutions quickly. The harder problem is determining whether those solutions actually satisfy human intent across edge cases, maintainability, and hidden requirements.

The paper is relevant to teams adopting coding agents because it shifts attention from generation speed to evaluation infrastructure, reviewer workload, and the limits of test suites.