Before the First Edit? Measuring When Coding-Agent Guidance Actually Arrives

Thupakula Sai Varun

When a coding-agent harness promises guidance before the first source edit, what event does it actually intercept? We audit five separate events: policy assignment, request eligibility, trigger, plan delivery, and observed source-content change. A prescribed-action comparison exposes the coverage of three gate rules but cannot tell us how an agent would continue after receiving a plan. We therefore run local agents on public software issues and hash Python files before and after each executed action. In a pilot-guided, 76-arm study using Qwen2.5-Coder 14B, 15 arms change Python source across seven tasks and three repositories. Guidance precedes every observed first change, but every change uses a structured editor and the study misses its prespecified 20-arm coverage target. Post hoc local tests find seven changed arms that pass the tested target and regression selectors; four of those seven use incomplete regression lists. Public PAUSE and SI2CA trajectories add source-text changes bracketed by adjacent reads, but lack synchronized filesystem states and cannot identify exact first mutations. The audit makes the timing claim testable within a stated source scope. These data do…