Preprint
Oct 2026
Hidden in Plain Sight: an Empirical Study about The Instruction Stacks of Coding Agents
Coding agents send their models more than the user's prompt: they add instructions, tool definitions, and environmental context that form an instruction stack. This stack guides execution and changes across releases, yet remains largely unexposed to users and insufficiently characterized in research. We present a longi...
Felipe de Sant'Anna Paixão, Dhyego Tavares, Eduardo Almeida et al.
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