TraceCoder: Explainable and Auditable Code Generation with Position-Key Snippet Versioning
LLM-based coding agents produce black-box code with hidden rationale and ephemeral repair histories. TraceCoder introduces three complementary mechanisms—a relational snippet-history schema, a browser-based visualizer, and a fractional position-key indexing scheme—to make code generation auditable and replayable. Evaluated on 30 algorithmic tasks, it achieves 30% mean Chg% and traceable repair events for 30% of snippets.
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[Submitted on 28 Jul 2026]
Title:TraceCoder: Explainable and Auditable Code Generation with Position-Key Snippet Versioning
View a PDF of the paper titled TraceCoder: Explainable and Auditable Code Generation with Position-Key Snippet Versioning, by Rwaida Alssadi and 8 other authors
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Abstract:Contemporary LLM-based coding agents produce code as black-box outputs: the rationale behind each line is hidden, the evolution of the code through benchmark-driven repair is ephemeral, and post-hoc auditing is impossible. We present a code generation concept that addresses these shortcomings through three complementary mechanisms: (i) a relational snippet-history schema that records, per repair event, the benchmark reference, round number, failure text, and LLM explanation, enabling full provenance queries; (ii) a browser-based visualisation tool that renders this history as heat-mapped, hover-annotated source code; and (iii) a competitive fractional position-key indexing scheme with tree-node delimiters that assigns stable, lexicographically-ordered identifiers to each code snippet, enabling fine-grained tracking without disrupting surrounding lines. We evaluate TraceCoder on 30 algorithmic programming tasks spanning string processing, mathematical computation, and data-structure manipulation, across two provider configurations. Of these, 10 exhaust the 6-iteration budget on tasks with subtle edge-case behaviour. Mean Chg% reaches 30%, three in ten code snippets carry a traceable repair-event row, compared to 21% when using Gemini 2.0 Flash as sole provider on a 20-task subset. Three detailed case studies demonstrate how the system explains which specific benchmark failures shaped each line of the final program. The proposed mechanism makes the internal "narrative" of automated code generation auditable and replayable, a property essential for trust and accountability in production deployments.
Comments: Submitted Version (version submitted on May deadline to AGENTICS 2026). Version of Record to appear in AGENTICS proceedings
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.26307 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2607.26307v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.26307
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Marius Silaghi [view email] [v1] Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:03:52 UTC (137 KB)
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