Someone at work shared around this paper entitled “Bootstrapping Coding Agents: The Specification is the Program”. From the abstract:

A coding agent can bootstrap itself. Starting from a 926-word specification and a first implementation produced by an existing agent (Claude Code), a newly generated agent re-implements the same specification correctly from scratch. This reproduces, in the domain of AI coding agents, the classical bootstrap sequence known from compiler construction, and instantiates the meta-circular property known from Lisp.

I read the paper, and I have thoughts.

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