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arXiv · 2605.24279

ContextEcho: A Benchmark for Persona Drift in Long Agentic-Coding Sessions

Xianzhong Ding·Yangyang Yu·Changwei Liu·Bill Zhao·Le Chen·Tao Chen
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Abstract

A frontier language model's acknowledged "helpful programming assistant" persona does not survive long agentic-coding sessions in the deployment regime that production products actually run. After hours of tool-using debugging, a model that initially hedges preferences ("I don't have preferences") may begin asserting them ("Python - the feedback loop is instant..."), revealing user-visible drift that deployer evaluations may miss. Existing persona-stability studies focus on short dialogues and report little shift, leaving real-world code-generation regimes - thousands of tool-using turns, compaction, and hours-long sessions - largely uncharacterized. We introduce ContextEcho, a benchmark and reusable harness for measuring persona drift at deployment scale. It combines a 25-probe identity suite, a snapshot-then-probe protocol that forks conversation state without perturbing the main session, complementary judged and judge-free measurement surfaces, and three anonymized Claude Code sessions spanning 3,746-9,716 turns. Across 23 frontier models, ContextEcho shows that persona drift is general across organizations rather than family-specific, that in-session compaction does not reliably reset it, and that a single-shot anchor restores the trained register across measured targets. It also reveals mode-dependent downstream effects: while drift can facilitate tool-using continuation, in tool-free chat it breaks formatting contracts and inflates output length. Overall, ContextEcho provides researchers and deployers an open-source framework to audit whether the persona a model ships with is the persona users encounter at session end, across chat-completions API targets and without retraining.

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Xianzhong Ding, Yangyang Yu, Changwei Liu, Bill Zhao, Le Chen, Tao Chen. 2026-08-27. ContextEcho: A Benchmark for Persona Drift in Long Agentic-Coding Sessions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24279

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