Inversion of Coupling Control: August 2026

Tuesday, 4 August 2026

Measuring AI-driven code degradation

Why the measurement comes first

A degradation study is only as good as its metrics. If the numbers are vague, the conclusion is vague. This companion defines each metric the harness records, so a reader can check the results against exactly what was measured. The results paper reports what the numbers did. This paper says what the numbers are.

Two design choices shape everything below. Both exist to make a per-change measurement trustworthy.

The agent delta is isolated. Each checkpoint produces two commits. The first is the agent commit. Its diff against its parent is exactly what the AI changed, and nothing else. The second is a reset commit that re-normalizes the tree for the next step. Any metric described as "of a change" is computed on that agent diff. So blast radius, coupling, and churn measure the agent's edit, not harness bookkeeping.

Capture now, derive later. A run stores only raw data on the branches. The agent envelope. The raw pass or fail of every test. The committed source at each step. Every metric below is recomputed offline from that history. So a metric can be defined or corrected after a run and re-applied to it, with no new agent cost. Every number was produced this way.

Ground rules for the structural metrics

Four conventions apply to every structural metric in Section 3.

Production Java only. Structural metrics ignore test code, build files, and configuration. Java under the main source tree is counted. OfficeFloor's YAML wiring is counted separately and never mixed into a Java denominator.
Per-function CC and SLOC. A static analyzer (lizard) reports two numbers per function. CC is cyclomatic complexity, the count of independent paths through the function. SLOC is source lines of code. These two feed most of what follows.
The complexity threshold is 10. A function is "complex" when its CC exceeds 10. This is the standard Radon threshold, applied identically to both arms.
The dynamic subsystem. Some metrics run over the whole application. Others run over the "touched subsystem": every production function in a file changed since the chain's base commit. Scoping this way follows the evolving footprint, and it automatically includes any new class the agent creates. So a growing hotspot cannot hide in a fixed file list.

Structural metrics

Erosion ratio · whole-app and scoped

mass(f) = CC(f) × √SLOC(f)
Erosion = Σ_{CC(f) > 10} mass(f) ÷ Σ_{all f} mass(f)

Measures: How concentrated complexity is. The share of total complexity "mass" that sits in functions above the CC threshold.
Source: lizard CC and SLOC over production Java. Reported twice: over the whole app, and over the touched subsystem (erosion_scoped).
Reads high: When a few heavy functions hold most of the complexity.
In this run: wash Both arms near identical. A ratio normalizes away the concentration it targets. See Section 6.

Verbosity ratio

Verbosity = | CloneLines ∪ PatternLines | ÷ LOC

Measures: Duplicated and boilerplate-flagged lines as a share of code.
Source: Clone lines from a copy-paste detector (jscpd, strict mode). Pattern lines from a structural search (ast-grep) run against a rule set of wasteful Java idioms. The two line sets are unioned, then divided by lines of code.
Reads high: When code is repeated or padded with boilerplate. Note the index can exceed 1.0, because a clone counts lines on both sides of the pair. It is an index, not a fraction.
In this run: separates OfficeFloor higher at every phase, from its many similar small functions. Neither arm's verbosity grows.

Blast radius per-change family

existing_fns_modified = # already-present functions whose body the diff touched
files_created = # new production files · churn = production lines added / removed

Measures: How much pre-existing code a single change disturbs, and whether it adds or mutates.
Source: The agent diff. Hunk headers (git diff -U0) give the changed line ranges. lizard gives each function's line range. A function counts as modified when a changed range overlaps its body, and its file existed before the change. New files are counted as created.
Reads high: existing_fns_modified is high when a change reaches into working code. files_created is high when a change adds new units instead.
In this run: separates Spring's existing_fns_modified slope excludes zero; OfficeFloor's is flat and it creates ~19 files per chain.

Hotspot CC worst function

hotspot_cc = max_{f in touched subsystem} CC(f)

Measures: The single most complex production function in the evolving footprint, reported with its name.
Source: lizard over the touched subsystem. The function with the highest CC, ties broken by SLOC.
Reads high: When one function is becoming a god-method.
In this run: overlap Both arms rise; Spring higher, but the confidence intervals overlap.

Weighted Methods per Class (WMC) worst class

WMC(class) = Σ_{methods m in class} CC(m)
wmc_max = max_class WMC(class)

Measures: The god-class indicator. The heaviest class by total method complexity.
Source: lizard functions grouped by file (one top-level class per Java file), summed per class, maximized over classes in the touched subsystem.
Reads high: When one class carries many rules. This catches what erosion misses: a class that stays tidy method by method while accumulating many methods.
In this run: overlap Both rise; Spring's final WMC is ~2× OfficeFloor's, but the slopes overlap.

Entry-handler CC the front door

entry_cc = CC( f ) where f matches the arm's create-entry pattern

Measures: The complexity of the one function the create endpoint routes through.
Source: An arm-specific regular expression over "file::function". Spring matches OwnerRestControllerV1::addOwner. OfficeFloor matches its designated create-entry, BuildOwner::service. lizard gives the CC.
Reads high: When the single handler absorbs each new rule rather than delegating it.
In this run: separates cleanly Spring +0.25 per checkpoint, OfficeFloor +0.06. The confidence intervals do not overlap. Final CC 6.7 vs 1.9.

Change spread reach

packages_touched = # distinct package directories the diff's production Java touches

Measures: How far across the package tree a single change reaches. A sibling to blast radius, measured by directories rather than functions.
Source: The agent diff. Distinct parent directories of the changed production Java files.
Reads high: When a change is scattered across many packages.
In this run: both near zero Neither arm's spread trends.

Re-edit rate temporal coupling

for each function the change edits, blame its whole body at this commit
re-edit rate = ( body lines authored by an earlier checkpoint ) ÷ ( total edited-function body lines )

Measures: When a change edits existing code, how much of that code earlier rules wrote.
Source: For every production function the change modifies, git blame attributes each body line to the checkpoint that last wrote it. A line counts as "prior" when its author is a checkpoint after the base but before this one. Whole function bodies are counted on purpose. A one-line insert into a large shared method still signals coupling, and line-of-diff blame would miss it.
Reads high: When new rules keep reopening functions that earlier rules grew.
In this run: separates cleanly Spring's slope is positive, OfficeFloor's is negative. The intervals do not overlap. The sign of the coupling trend flips between the architectures.

Function-package stats OfficeFloor-specific

fn_count, fn_nloc_avg, fn_nloc_max, fn_cc_max over the wired-function package

Measures: The size distribution of OfficeFloor's composed-function package.
Source: lizard over a configured package glob (the rest/function tree).
Reads high: The healthy-growth signal is a rising count while the average and maximum function size stay flat. That is addition without bloat.
In this run: Count rises steadily; per-function size stays flat. Consistent with add-not-mutate.

Lines of code size, reported separately

java_loc = production Java SLOC · yaml_loc = OfficeFloor wiring lines

Measures: Raw size. Kept as context, and as the denominator for verbosity.
Source: lizard for Java. A non-blank non-comment line count for YAML.
Note: YAML is never folded into a Java ratio. It is reported on its own so OfficeFloor's habit of spreading logic into wiring cannot distort a Java metric.

Correctness metrics

Correctness is scored from the raw pass or fail of every acceptance test, captured at run time. The tests are black-box. They hit the REST API, so both arms are judged by identical externals.

The test taxonomy. There is one test class per checkpoint, named CpNN, tagged so the harness runs checkpoints one through K at checkpoint K. The method-name prefix encodes a category: core, error, or functionality. A test whose own checkpoint is earlier than K counts as a Regression test at K, whatever its category.

Strict / ISO / Core pass correctness gates

strict = all selected tests pass · iso = this checkpoint's own tests pass · core = the core tests pass

Measures: Three tiers of "did it work". Strict is everything. ISO ignores the regression tests and asks only whether this checkpoint's new behavior works. Core asks only the essential path.
Reads high: All three are 1.0 when the checkpoint fully satisfies its suite.
In this run: Strict pass was 1.0 in every phase, both arms.

Normalized Change SWE-CI · range -1 to 1

if passed ≥ baseline: (passed − baseline) ÷ (target − baseline)
else: (passed − baseline) ÷ baseline

Measures: Net progress in passing tests from one checkpoint to the next, on a signed scale.
Source: The passing-test set before and after the checkpoint. "baseline" is the prior passing count, "target" the total selected.
Reads: Positive for improvement, negative for regression. The definition is asymmetric on purpose. It punishes a regression harder than it rewards an equal-sized improvement.

Regressions count

regressions = | passing_before − passing_after |

Measures: How many tests that passed before the checkpoint fail after it.
Reads high: When a change breaks previously working behavior. This is the direct safety signal.
In this run: no difference Zero regressions in either arm across 200 checkpoints each.

EvoScore SWE-CI · discounted success

per chain: ( Σ_i γⁱ · s_i ) ÷ ( Σ_i γⁱ ), then averaged over chains

Measures: Success across a whole chain, weighted by checkpoint. s_i is the strict-pass indicator at checkpoint i.
Source: The strict-pass sequence per chain. The discount γ is a parameter; γ ≥ 1 rewards staying green late in the run, when the codebase is largest.
In this run: 1.0 at every γ for both arms.

Zero-Regression Rate across chains

ZRR = ( # chains with zero total regressions ) ÷ ( # chains )

Measures: The share of full runs that never broke anything.
Reads high: 1.0 means every chain stayed regression-free end to end.
In this run: no difference 1.000 for both arms.

Process metrics

These come straight from the agent session envelope, captured at run time. They cannot be recomputed later, so they are stored raw.

Cost, tokens, and duration the agent envelope

cost_usd: Dollar cost of the checkpoint's agent session.
tokens: Input, output, cache-read, and cache-creation token counts. Cache-read is a proxy for how much prior context the model re-read.
num_turns: Tool-use turns the agent took to finish.
duration_ms: Wall-clock time, including tool runs and any waits.
duration_api_ms: Model inference time only. The cleaner "thinking cost" signal.
attempts: Every attempt is recorded, including failed or rate-limited ones and their wait time, so true cost and wall-clock are recoverable.
In this run: Cost and API time fell slightly over each run in both arms. The "comprehension gets more expensive" idea did not appear at this scale.

The statistic: degradation slope

A single metric at a single checkpoint is noise. The signal is the trend across the run. The harness reduces each metric to one number per arm, with an interval.

Degradation slope m the headline number

m = OLS slope of ( metric value vs checkpoint index )
reported on the mean curve, with a 95% bootstrap CI resampled over chains

Mean curve: At each checkpoint, average the metric across the ten chains. Fit a straight line to that averaged curve. Its slope is m.
Confidence interval: Resample the ten chains with replacement, 2,000 times. Refit m each time. The 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles are the 95% interval. The interval reflects chain-to-chain variability.
Phase means: Checkpoints one to twenty are also binned into five phases, Start to Final, to show the trajectory in a small table.

How to read a slope A metric separates the two architectures when one arm's interval excludes zero and the other's brackets it. It separates strongly when the two arms' intervals do not overlap. A rising slope with an interval that stays clear of zero is the degradation signal. An interval that straddles zero is a flat metric.

The one caveat that matters. Not every metric can see every difference. Erosion is a whole-application ratio. When one arm adds many small functions, it inflates the denominator at the same time the other arm concentrates complexity in the numerator. Both effects move the ratio the same way, so the ratio cancels the difference. The lesson generalizes. For architectural degradation under AI-driven change, lead with un-normalized, per-change statistics such as blast radius, entry-handler complexity, and re-edit rate. Treat aggregate ratios as secondary. The headline number should be one that can discriminate.

Controls that keep a number honest

Three controls protect the metrics from being gamed or contaminated. They are part of the measurement, not a footnote to it.

Experimenter-owned tests, reset before scoring. The acceptance tests are black-box and reset to their authored version before the correctness gate runs. An agent that weakens a test cannot produce a false pass. Any edit it makes is recorded, then reverted.
A pinned project guide. The leveling document is restored to its base version after every checkpoint, so it can never become accumulating memory across checkpoints.
Provenance and a config snapshot. Each run records the model, the tool versions, the agent environment, and a snapshot of the exact metric configuration used. So a metric recomputed later uses the same definitions the run was scored under.

In this run the agent never edited a pinned document and never tampered with a test, across all 400 sessions. The controls were never triggered. Their presence still removes two ways the numbers could have been wrong.

References and notes

SlopCodeBench · arXiv:2603.24755. Source of the Erosion and Verbosity definitions, the degradation-slope statistic, and the prompt-intervention arms.
SWE-CI · arXiv:2603.03823. Source of Normalized Change, EvoScore, and Zero-Regression Rate.
Weighted Methods per Class follows the Chidamber and Kemerer object-oriented metric suite.
OfficeFloor · officefloor.net. The graph-of-functions framework used in the OfficeFloor arm.

Companion. The results, with confidence intervals and the full slope table, are in "Architecture as the independent variable". This paper defines the instruments. That paper reports the readings.

Architecture as the independent variable

Abstract

AI coding agents now take on long, iterative work. A worry has followed. Codebases seem to degrade under sustained agentic change. That degradation is usually studied as a property of the agent. We ask a different question. Is it a property of the architecture the agent is asked to extend?

We built a harness that holds the agent fixed. Each step gets a fresh, context-free claude-opus-4-8 session. Architecture is the only thing that varies. The same twenty owner-creation rules were added, checkpoint by checkpoint, to two forks of one REST application. One fork is a conventional Spring @RestController. The other is an OfficeFloor pipeline of YAML-composed functions. Ten chains per arm, times twenty checkpoints, gives 400 agent sessions. Every metric is re-derived from the commit history. Each slope carries a 95% bootstrap confidence interval over chains.

The result is sharp in one direction and null in another. How change is absorbed separates the two architectures cleanly. In the Spring arm, per-change blast radius, create-endpoint complexity, and temporal coupling all rise. Their confidence intervals exclude zero. In the OfficeFloor arm they stay flat, and it keeps adding small isolated units. Yet the benchmark's nominal "erosion" ratio does not separate the arms at all. It was meant to be the decisive statistic. It was not. And neither architecture produced a single test regression across 200 checkpoints each. Architecture governs the mechanism of degradation. At this horizon it has not yet changed the observed correctness. We report what held, what washed out, and why the deciding statistic was not the one we set out to measure.

The question

A coding agent asked to add one small feature usually does fine. The concern is the hundredth small feature. Iterative, agent-driven extension may leave a codebase quietly worse. More tangled. More concentrated. More expensive to keep changing. Anecdotes are common. Controlled measurement is rare.

Most attempts treat the agent as the variable. Different models. Different prompts. Different scaffolds. The task stays fixed. That tells you which agent degrades a codebase least. It cannot tell you something a system designer also needs to know. Does the architecture itself change how much damage accumulates?

So we invert the design. We hold the agent constant. Architecture becomes the independent variable. We take two implementations of one application. We feed both the same feature requirements, one checkpoint at a time. We watch how each absorbs twenty rounds of accumulating change. If degradation is purely the agent's fault, the arms should degrade alike. If architecture is a lever, they should diverge. The shape of the divergence then tells us which architectural properties matter.

Contribution A reproducible harness that isolates architecture as the cause of AI-driven code degradation. The agent, the task, the tests, and the leveling documentation are held fixed across both arms. It ships with a full result set, with confidence intervals, on which structural properties separate the architectures and which do not.

Results at a glance

We track thirteen metrics. The arms separate on the ones that describe how a change touches the codebase. They refuse to separate on the aggregate "erosion" ratio and on correctness. Here is the verdict, one dimension at a time.

◆ Separates cleanly

Blast radius

Spring's per-change edits to existing functions grow. The slope CI excludes zero. OfficeFloor's is flat. Spring disturbs twice the existing surface.

◆ Separates cleanly

Create-endpoint complexity

Spring's single addOwner handler bloats to CC 6.7. OfficeFloor's create-entry stays at 1.9. The CIs do not overlap.

◆ Separates cleanly

Temporal coupling

Spring keeps re-opening earlier rules' code. Its slope is positive. OfficeFloor's re-edit rate falls. The CIs do not overlap.

◆ Separates cleanly

Add vs. mutate

OfficeFloor creates about 19 new files per chain. Spring creates about 1. The two architectures absorb a new rule in opposite ways.

≈ Washes out

Erosion ratio

The nominal decisive metric. Both arms end near 0.012. Both CIs touch zero. The whole-app ratio cannot see the difference.

✕ No difference

Correctness & safety

Zero regressions. Full strict-pass. EvoScore 1.0. In both arms. Erosion stayed latent. It never broke anything at this horizon.

How to read the rest of this paper. Section 3 is the method. It covers the arms, the task, the fixed agent, the metrics, and the statistics. Section 4 is the evidence. It follows the six verdicts above. One figure anchors it. That figure is a coefficient plot of every degradation slope with its confidence interval. Sections 5 to 7 discuss why the designated statistic failed, the threats to validity, and how to reproduce every number.

Method

3.1 Two arms, one application

Both arms fork the same REST implementation of the Spring PetClinic sample. They share a data model, a database schema, and one black-box HTTP contract. They differ only in how request-handling logic is structured.

Spring. The conventional layered style. New behavior for POST /api/owners is added by editing a Spring @RestController method and the service beneath it.
OfficeFloor. A graph-of-functions style. The create-owner endpoint is a pipeline wired in YAML. New behavior is added by writing a new small function class and wiring it in.

The two base branches are matched. The first checkpoint starts each arm from an equivalent, working application. Everything downstream of the architecture is held identical. That means the requirements, the acceptance tests, the agent, the model, and a fixed project guide.

3.2 The task: twenty accumulating rules

Each checkpoint adds one requirement to the owner-creation endpoint. Every requirement stays in force for all later checkpoints. The rules are ordinary business logic. Duplicate detection by household, telephone, and email. Telephone and city-name normalization. Derived fields such as initials, customer code, membership number and tier, namesake count, and locality. A default registration date. A shared-household flag. City-capacity limits. An audit trail with a bulk-signup warning. By checkpoint twenty, one POST endpoint must enforce twenty interacting rules. That is exactly the kind of accreting hotspot where architecture should start to matter.

3.3 The fixed agent

At every checkpoint the harness launches a fresh, headless claude-opus-4-8 session. It gets only that checkpoint's specification. No conversation history. No memory of earlier checkpoints. No resume. The condition is deliberate. The agent must reason from the code's current structure alone. That is the setting in which a self-describing architecture can pay off. It also removes carried context as a confound. The agent runs with the same tools and the same neutral just-solve prompt in both arms. The prompt says to implement the change so all tests pass.

3.4 Isolation and anti-gaming

Three controls keep the comparison honest. They stop the agent from inflating its own score.

Experimenter-owned acceptance tests. Each checkpoint's tests are black-box. They hit the REST API. The harness injects them and resets them to the authored version before the correctness gate runs. So an agent that weakens a test cannot produce a false pass. Any edit the agent makes to a test is recorded, then reverted.
A pinned project guide. A fixed CLAUDE.md sits in both arms. It is restored to its base version after every checkpoint. It can never become cross-checkpoint memory.
A two-commit history. Each checkpoint makes an agent commit. Its diff is exactly what the agent changed. A reset commit follows. It re-normalizes the tree and stages the next checkpoint's test. Isolating the agent's true delta is what makes the structural metrics measurable per change.

Across all 400 sessions the agent edited a pinned document 0 times. It tampered with an acceptance test 0 times. The controls were never exercised. Their presence still removes two obvious threats to validity.

3.5 Capture now, derive later

A run stores only raw capture on the branches. That capture is the part that cannot be recomputed. It holds the agent's cost, tokens, and full event stream. It holds the raw pass/fail map of every test. It holds the true pre-normalization diff. It holds a provenance manifest with the model, tool versions, and a config snapshot. Every derived metric is recomputed later from the commit history. That covers erosion, verbosity, blast radius, coupling, and the rest. The split has a payoff. A metric can be defined or fixed long after a run and re-applied to it, with no new agent cost. Every number in this paper came from that offline re-derivation over the committed trees.

3.6 What we measure

Structural metrics are computed over production Java only. The same tools and thresholds apply to both arms.

Erosion. The share of total complexity mass that sits in high-complexity functions. Mass is cyclomatic complexity times the square root of SLOC, per function. High means above the standard CC = 10 threshold. This is the benchmark's headline statistic.
Verbosity. Flagged clone lines and anti-pattern lines, per line of code.
Blast radius. For a checkpoint's change: how many already-existing functions it modifies, and how many new files it adds.
Weighted Methods per Class. The god-class indicator. The highest per-class sum of method complexity.
Entry-handler complexity. The cyclomatic complexity of the one function the create endpoint routes through. In Spring that is addOwner. In OfficeFloor it is the designated create-entry.
Temporal coupling, or re-edit rate. When a checkpoint edits an existing function, the share of that function's body written by earlier checkpoints. High means new rules keep re-opening old ones.
Process and correctness. Cost, tokens, and API duration. Then Strict, ISO, and Core pass, Normalized Change, regressions, EvoScore, and Zero-Regression Rate.

3.7 Statistics

The degradation slope m is the OLS slope of a metric against checkpoint index within a chain. We report the mean-curve m with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval. The interval is resampled over the ten chains, with 2,000 replicates. A metric separates the arms when one arm's slope CI excludes zero and the other's brackets it. It separates more strongly when the two arms' CIs do not overlap. The scale is 10 chains, times 20 checkpoints, times 2 arms. That is 400 agent sessions. Each slope is fed by 200 checkpoints per arm.

Positionality and conflict of interest. OfficeFloor is authored by the experimenter. The OfficeFloor arm's base was purpose-built for this comparison. We mitigate this several ways. Identical requirements. Identical black-box tests, scored by an anti-gaming gate. A fixed agent. Fully published commit histories, so every number is independently recomputable. A reader should still weight the framing accordingly. See section 6.

Results

4.1 The degradation slopes, at a glance

Figure 1 plots the degradation slope and its 95% interval for every metric where the arms behave informatively. The metrics have different units. So each row is scaled to its own range. Within a row, two things matter. Does an interval cross the zero line? Do the two arms' intervals overlap?

Spring OfficeFloor ● slope estimate · ▬ 95% CI · ┆ zero tick · each row scaled independently

Existing fns modified

◆ separates · per-change blast radius

+0.052

+0.0056

Files created

◆ separates · add vs mutate

-0.0021

+0.021

Entry-handler CC

◆ separates · create endpoint

+0.252

+0.062

Re-edit rate

◆ separates · temporal coupling

+0.011

-0.024

Hotspot CC

≈ overlap / wash · worst function

+0.241

+0.172

WMC (god-class)

≈ overlap / wash · worst class

+1.77

+1.44

Erosion

≈ overlap / wash · whole-app ratio

+0.0007

+0.0006

Verbosity

≈ overlap / wash · clones and patterns

-0.0058

-0.0052

Figure 1. Degradation slopes with 95% bootstrap CIs. Four metrics describe how change lands: blast radius, files created, entry-handler CC, and re-edit rate. They separate the arms. Spring's disturbance and coupling rise. OfficeFloor's stay flat or fall. The two aggregate complexity slopes, hotspot CC and WMC, both rise but overlap. Erosion is the nominal decisive statistic. It is a wash. Both slopes hug zero.

4.2 How a change lands: the arms separate

The clearest signal is blast radius. It measures how much pre-existing code a single new rule disturbs. In Spring it climbs over the run. The slope is +0.052, CI 0.016 to 0.084. That excludes zero. In OfficeFloor it is statistically flat. Aggregated, Spring modifies about twice the existing surface per chain. It almost never gets away with touching nothing. OfficeFloor takes the zero-blast path more than a third of the time. It adds a rule without re-opening any existing function.

Table 1. Blast radius per chain (200 checkpoints per arm)
Signal	Spring	OfficeFloor	Reading
Existing functions modified / chain	55.8	28.2	Spring 2× the disturbance
Zero-blast checkpoints	11/200	70/200	OF touches nothing 35% of the time
New files created / chain	1.2	18.7	add vs. mutate
Line churn / chain	+500 / −22	+662 / −30	OF adds more lines, in new units

This is the mechanism in one table. A new rule in Spring is folded into existing methods. The same rule in OfficeFloor is attached as a new function. A cross-check from the agents' own event streams makes it concrete. Over the first five chains, the OfficeFloor agents wrote 75 distinct function and handler classes. That is a whole rest/function/owner/ package. Think AssignMembershipTier, CheckCityCapacity, AuditOwnerCreation. Spring wrote 20. It folded the same logic into its controller and service.

The consequence shows up in two places. The create endpoint. And temporal coupling. These are the cleanest separations in the study. Here the arms' confidence intervals do not even overlap.

Table 2. Concentration and coupling (final values and slopes)
Metric	Spring	OfficeFloor	Slope CIs overlap?
Entry-handler CC (final)	6.7	1.9	no, clean split
Entry-handler CC slope m [CI]	+0.25 [.14,.38]	+0.06 [.05,.07]	Spring bloats ~4× faster
Re-edit rate (mean)	0.331	0.216
Re-edit rate slope m [CI]	+0.011 [.005,.016]	−0.024 [−.030,−.018]	no, opposite signs
God-class WMC (final)	64.5	35.7	Spring's worst class ~2× heavier

Spring's single create handler grows about 4× faster than OfficeFloor's. It ends more than three times as complex. And its re-edit rate rises while OfficeFloor's falls. So as the run proceeds, Spring keeps re-opening code written for earlier rules. OfficeFloor increasingly leaves earlier rules alone. The sign of the coupling slope flips between the two architectures. That is the erosion thesis in its strongest, cleanest form. It is just not measured by the erosion metric.

4.3 The designated statistic washes out

The benchmark's headline metric is erosion. It is the fraction of whole-app complexity mass held in high-complexity functions. It was meant to be the decisive number. It is not. Both arms' slopes hug zero. Both confidence intervals include zero. The phase-binned means converge on nearly the same final value.

Table 3. Erosion, phase-binned mean (Start to Final)
Arm	Start	Early	Mid	Late	Final	slope m [CI]
Spring	0	0	0	0.0036	0.0128	.0007 [0,.0017]
OfficeFloor	0	0.0059	0.0057	0.0052	0.0121	.0006 [0,.0014]

The reason is structural, and it is instructive. Erosion is a ratio over the whole application. OfficeFloor adds many small functions. That inflates the denominator, the total complexity mass. At the same time, Spring concentrates complexity in the numerator, a few high-complexity functions. Both effects push the ratio the same way. Against a roughly 280-function application, one bloating controller barely moves it. So the metric meant to be decisive is the one metric blind to the difference. It normalizes away the very concentration it was trying to detect. The discriminating statistics are the un-normalized, per-change ones. Blast-radius slope. Entry-handler CC. Re-edit rate.

4.4 Verbosity: a real cost, but a constant one

With clone and pattern detection restored, verbosity gives an honest counterpoint. OfficeFloor carries more duplication than Spring at every phase. Its 75-odd small function classes share near-identical scaffolding. The clone detector flags it. But neither arm's verbosity grows. Both slopes are slightly negative.

Table 4. Verbosity index, phase-binned mean (flagged lines ÷ LOC)
Arm	Start	Early	Mid	Late	Final	slope m [CI]
OfficeFloor	1.20	1.19	1.16	1.14	1.12	−.0052 [−.0054,−.0049]
Spring	1.08	1.07	1.04	1.02	0.99	−.0058 [−.0061,−.0054]

This exposes the real cost of the OfficeFloor strategy. Isolation-by-proliferation pays a constant boilerplate tax. There is more repeated scaffolding up front. In exchange, the per-change blast radius stays bounded and does not compound. Spring pays the opposite way. Little duplication, but an entanglement cost that keeps rising. One note on the numbers. The verbosity index goes above 1.0 because clone lines count both sides of each pair. It is an index, not a fraction.

4.5 No correctness difference, and cost falls

Two outcomes people expect to move did not. Both arms are perfectly green. Strict-pass is 1.0 in every phase. EvoScore is 1.0 at every discount factor. The Zero-Regression Rate is 1.000. No checkpoint in either arm broke a previously passing test, across 200 checkpoints. The structural erosion is entirely latent. It accumulates. At this twenty-checkpoint horizon it never bit. Per-change cost also fell slightly over each run, in both arms. The slope is about −0.008 USD per checkpoint. That is the opposite of the idea that comprehension gets more expensive as the hotspot grows. Prompt-cache reuse and the agent's own efficiency dominate any rising-comprehension effect at this scale.

The finding in one sentence Architecture cleanly governs how AI-driven change is absorbed. Spring's disturbance and coupling grow. OfficeFloor's stay flat. But at twenty checkpoints that difference in mechanism has not yet changed correctness. And the aggregate erosion ratio is too coarse to see it.

Discussion

5.1 Architecture is a real lever, on the mechanism

The strong reading is not that OfficeFloor is better. It is that the two architectures put an agent's accumulating changes in structurally different places. And that this is measurable, with tight confidence intervals. Spring absorbs each rule by mutating and re-coupling existing units. So blast radius, create-endpoint complexity, and temporal coupling all trend up. OfficeFloor absorbs each rule by adding an isolated unit. So those same quantities stay flat. The cost is more boilerplate. There is a practical takeaway for anyone building a system that AI agents will maintain over a long horizon. The variable that separated is the one to manage. Keep the per-change blast radius bounded. Then the compounding costs, coupling and hotspot concentration, never get a foothold.

5.2 Choose the right decisive statistic

Our most transferable finding is a caution about metrics. The pre-designated decisive metric was the whole-application erosion ratio. It is the wrong instrument for this question. Normalization cancels the concentration it targets. Studies of architectural degradation under AI-driven change should lead with un-normalized, per-change statistics. Blast-radius slope. Entry-point complexity. Temporal coupling. Treat aggregate ratios as secondary. The headline number should be the one that can discriminate.

5.3 Latent vs. manifest degradation

Zero regressions in either arm is itself a result. It says Spring's structural entanglement is latent risk. It is not yet realized failure. Not at twenty checkpoints, against this acceptance suite. So the "OfficeFloor is safer" claim, in the sense of fewer broken tests, is unsupported by this run. It stays an argument about maintainability and future change-cost. The structural metrics support that. They do not speak to observed correctness. Surfacing a correctness difference would need more. A longer horizon. A harder or more interdependent test suite. Or a task where the rules conflict, rather than merely accumulate.

Threats to validity

Conflict of interest. OfficeFloor is the experimenter's framework. Its arm's base was purpose-built. Identical requirements, black-box anti-gaming tests, a fixed agent, and published commit histories mitigate the risk. They do not remove framing bias.
Single agent, single strategy. One model, claude-opus-4-8. One neutral prompt, just-solve. The harness supports intervention arms, anti-slop and plan-first, and other models. None are run here. Results may not carry across agents.
Single domain and hotspot. One application. One accreting endpoint. One family of business rules. Architectures that look different on a create-owner pipeline may converge on other workloads.
Horizon. Twenty checkpoints separated the mechanism. It did not manifest a correctness or cost difference. The most interesting effects may live past this horizon.
Metric construct validity. Erosion's normalization limit is covered above. The verbosity index double-counts clone pairs. Structural metrics recomputed offline depend on the analysis-time versions of the complexity and clone tools. Provenance pins them, but they are not identical to run-time.
Independence. Chains are independent by construction. Each starts a fresh worktree from the base. But both arms ran from one machine and one quota window. Systematic model drift over the run would affect both arms alike.

Reproducibility

Every result here is recomputable from published artifacts. Each of the twenty chains is a git branch. It is named evolve/<run>/just-solve/<arm>/chain<n>. Per checkpoint, its history is an agent commit and a reset commit. A final commit carries the raw capture, a provenance manifest, and a snapshot of the exact analysis configuration used. The analysis tool re-derives every metric, including any added later. It materializes each checkpoint commit and recomputes over its source. So the tables above regenerate on demand. New metrics apply to the same run. Neither step re-invokes the agent.

Appendix A below lists the complete degradation-slope table for all thirteen tracked metrics, both arms, with 95% CIs. It is the full data behind Figure 1.

Conclusion

We held the coding agent fixed and varied only architecture. Architecture is a real lever on how AI-driven change accumulates. Across 400 sessions, the Spring arm's per-change blast radius, create-endpoint complexity, and temporal coupling rise. Their confidence intervals exclude zero. The OfficeFloor arm's stay flat. The difference is not visible in an aggregate erosion ratio. That ratio cannot see it. It is visible in the un-normalized statistics of how each change lands. That divergence in mechanism did not become a correctness difference at this horizon. Both arms stayed perfectly green. The next questions are about horizon and generality. Longer runs. Conflicting rather than accumulating requirements. More architectures. More agents. The aim is to learn whether the latent entanglement one architecture builds up eventually becomes the failures the other avoids.

Appendix. Full slope table

Degradation slope m (OLS on checkpoint index) with 95% bootstrap CI over 10 chains
Metric	Spring m [CI]	OfficeFloor m [CI]	Separates
Structural. How change lands
existing_fns_modified	+0.0523 [.016,.084]	+0.0056 [−.009,.023]	yes
files_created	−0.0021 [−.0037,−.0005]	+0.0208 [.008,.030]	yes
entry_cc	+0.252 [.137,.381]	+0.062 [.048,.068]	yes
reedit_rate	+0.0107 [.005,.016]	−0.0244 [−.030,−.018]	yes
Structural. Aggregate
hotspot_cc	+0.241 [.163,.343]	+0.172 [.102,.243]	overlap
wmc_max	+1.77 [1.38,2.06]	+1.44 [1.36,1.49]	overlap
packages_touched	+0.0092 [−.001,.017]	−0.0011 [−.007,.005]	both ~0
erosion	+0.0007 [0,.0017]	+0.0006 [0,.0014]	wash
erosion_scoped	+0.0021 [0,.0051]	+0.0014 [0,.0032]	wash
verbosity	−0.0058 [−.006,−.005]	−0.0052 [−.005,−.005]	level, not slope
Process
cost_usd	−0.0082 [−.015,−.002]	−0.0079 [−.015,−.001]	both fall
duration_api_ms	−1948 [−3552,−424]	−1267 [−2379,−151]	both fall
cache_read_tokens	−1643 [−8867,4647]	−4600 [−10060,−99]	noisy

Correctness held constant across both arms and all phases. Strict-pass 1.0. EvoScore 1.0 at γ = 1, 1.5, 2. Zero-Regression Rate 1.000. Pinned-doc touch 0/200. Acceptance-tamper 0/200.

References and notes

SlopCodeBench · arXiv:2603.24755. The no-context iterative-extension benchmark. The harness borrows its Erosion and Verbosity metric definitions, the degradation-slope statistic, and the prompt-intervention arms.
SWE-CI · arXiv:2603.03823. The CI-gate evaluation framework. The harness borrows Normalized Change, EvoScore, and Zero-Regression Rate.
spring-petclinic-rest. The REST PetClinic sample application both arms fork from.
OfficeFloor · officefloor.net. The graph-of-functions application framework used in the OfficeFloor arm.