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cff-version: 1.2.0
title: "Specification Gaming as an Orthogonal Failure Axis in Autonomous Coding Loops: The Verification-Source Decoupling Discipline"
message: "If you use the paper or this reference implementation, please cite the paper using the metadata from this file."
type: software
authors:
  - name: "Analyser"
    email: "analyser@gmail.com"
date-released: 2026-08-07
repository-code: "https://github.com/maskshell/solidforge-dsh"
url: "https://github.com/maskshell/solidforge-dsh/raw/main/docs/papers/spec-gaming-orthogonal-axis.pdf"
abstract: "Autonomous coding agents increasingly execute long-horizon loops of generation, verification, and repair. This paper argues that specification gaming is a fourth failure axis — orthogonal to context rot, error compounding, and goal drift at the level of defense mechanism — and proposes the Process/Outcome split plus verification-source decoupling as the engineering discipline; SolidForge (this repository) is its DeepSeek Harness-native reference implementation."
keywords:
  - specification gaming
  - autonomous coding agents
  - verification-source decoupling
  - loop engineering
  - AI safety
license: Apache-2.0
preferred-citation:
  type: article
  title: "Specification Gaming as an Orthogonal Failure Axis in Autonomous Coding Loops: The Verification-Source Decoupling Discipline"
  authors:
    - name: "Analyser"
      email: "analyser@gmail.com"
  year: 2026
  month: 8
  day: 7
  url: "https://github.com/maskshell/solidforge-dsh/raw/main/docs/papers/spec-gaming-orthogonal-axis.pdf"
  notes: "draft — unpublished; cite with the version date (2026-08-07) or the snapshot commit"