Theory of Code Space: Do Code Agents Understand Software Architecture?

arXiv:2603.00601v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: AI code agents excel at isolated tasks yet struggle with multi-file software engineering requiring architectural understanding. We introduce Theory of Code Space (ToCS), a benchmark that evaluates whether agents can construct, maintain, and update coherent architectural beliefs during codebase exploration. Agents explore procedurally generated codebases under partial observability — opening files under a budget — and periodically externalize their belief state as structured JSON, producing a time-series of architectural understanding. Three findings emerge from experiments with four baselines and six frontier LLMs. First, the Active-Passive Gap is model-dependent: one model builds better maps through active exploration than from seeing all files at once, while another shows the opposite — revealing that active exploration is itself a non-trivial capability absent from some models. Second, retaining structured belief maps in context acts as self-scaffolding for some models but not others, showing that the mechanism is model-dependent. Third, belief state maintenance varies dramatically: a smaller model maintains perfectly stable beliefs across probes while its larger sibling suffers catastrophic belief collapse — forgetting previously-discovered components between probes. We release ToCS as open-source software. Code: https://github.com/che-shr-cat/tocs