Code production is now a commodity; the bottleneck is knowing what to build and proving it works. We present the Kitchen Loop, a framework for autonomous, self-evolving software built on a unified trust model: (1) a specification surface enumerating what the product claims to support; (2) 'As a User x 1000', where an LLM agent exercises that surface as a synthetic power user at 1,000x human cadence; (3) Unbeatable Tests, ground-truth verification the code author cannot fake; and (4) Drift Control, continuous quality measurement with automated pause gates. We validate across two production systems over 285+ iterations, producing 1,094+ merged pull requests with zero regressions detected by the regression oracle (methodology in Section 6.1). We observe emergent properties at scale: multi-iteration self-correction chains, autonomous infrastructure healing, and monotonically improving quality gates. The primitives are not new; our contribution is their composition into a production-tested system with the operational discipline that makes long-running autonomous evolution safe.
Gistify! Codebase-Level Understanding via Runtime Execution
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Leveraging Large Language Models for Code Translation and Software Development in Scientific Computing
Institute for Clarity in Documentation（清晰文档研究所）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（巴黎-罗克琴特研究所）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉贾·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕勒尔研究实验室）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）
Specification-first convergence with an AI coding agent: a case study of dismantling a core architectural invariant across 189 files in a 717k-line codebase with no test oracle and no human code review
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering（保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Machine Learning Department（机器学习系）
FreshBrew: A Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Java Code Migration
Google（谷歌）；Max Planck Institut für Intelligente Systeme (MPI-IS)（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；ELLIS Institute, Tübingen（图宾根ELLIS研究所）；Salesforce；Gologic Inc（Gologic公司）
