Measuring Where Intent Gets Lost in Agentic Smart Contract Synthesis

Abhinav Goel, Agostino Capponi, Alfio Gliozzo, Chaitya Shah

AI agents can now write software from a plain-English description, but code that runs is not the same as code that does what was asked. This gap matters most for smart contracts, the programs behind Web3 applications that move money on a blockchain and cannot be fixed once deployed. We ask how to check whether an AI-written contract behaves as it should, and where the requested behavior gets lost. We design an evaluation built on execution rather than opinion. We replay the same transactions on an AI-written contract and on the original it should reproduce and measure how often they agree. We test every grading tool on planted mistakes, compare against an answer key written without the description, and audit our own scorer until known wrong answers cannot pass. Common methods, such as AI judges and standard analysis tools, miss obvious mistakes, and scoring choices matter too. Checking only the functions every system includes hid about half the difference between pipelines. We then propose an elicitation-first architecture. Before writing code, the agent asks the client a short checklist of questions, checks the contract against an independently written executable answer key, and…