SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch

Researchers introduced SpecFirst, a two-stage agent workflow for program synthesis.

One agent extracts a structured behavioral specification from docs and an execute-only binary, then a second agent implements the program from that spec.

On ProgramBench, SpecFirst outperformed a matched Direct-Synthesis baseline across four models.

It improved test pass rates and binary exploration coverage while reducing probe-and-code back-and-forth, suggesting spec discovery should be separated from coding.