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arXiv · 2611.04466

From Watching to Steering: Enabling Human-Coding Agent Collaboration through Execution Traces

Xiaoke Yan·Jiaying Lei·Danqing Shi·Zichen Wang·Nan Cao
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Abstract

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled coding agents to autonomously perform complex software development tasks, yet their long-running execution remains difficult for users to inspect, understand, and steer. We present Vibetrace, an interactive trace visualization and intervention system for agentic programming built upon OpenCode. Vibetrace introduces a human-agent collaboration paradigm of Observe, Understand, Intervene, and Evolve. It (1) visualizes agent workflows as interactive execution traces for inspecting actions, intermediate states, and failures; (2) enables users to fork execution from prior steps and provide targeted corrections without restarting validated progress; and (3) distills traces and human feedback into reusable skills for continual agent evolution. On SWE-bench Verified, distilled skills reduce input tokens by 23.0% and cost by 15.5%, while improving pass rate from 65.0% to 68.0%. User studies further demonstrate improved accuracy and efficiency over conventional log-based interaction.

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Xiaoke Yan, Jiaying Lei, Danqing Shi, Zichen Wang, Nan Cao. 2026-11-03. From Watching to Steering: Enabling Human-Coding Agent Collaboration through Execution Traces. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04466

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