@inproceedings{yilin-etal-2026-contract,
title = "Contract-Coding: Towards Repo-Level Generation via Structured Symbolic Paradigm",
author = "Yilin and
Zhao, Lujin and
Shi, Yijie",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.400/",
pages = "8187--8206",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed ``Vibe Coding'') exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47{\%} functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict ``specification-following'' to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding"
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<abstract>The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed “Vibe Coding”) exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47% functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict “specification-following” to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Contract-Coding: Towards Repo-Level Generation via Structured Symbolic Paradigm
%A Zhao, Lujin
%A Shi, Yijie
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%A Yilin
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F yilin-etal-2026-contract
%X The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed “Vibe Coding”) exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47% functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict “specification-following” to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.400/
%P 8187-8206
Markdown (Informal)
[Contract-Coding: Towards Repo-Level Generation via Structured Symbolic Paradigm](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.400/) (Yilin et al., Findings 2026)
ACL