Ark: A Minimal Open-Source Coding Agent Plus ArkBench, Where gpt-5.4-mini Solves 8 of 10 Maintenance Tasks

arXiv 2608.10934·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Arguing that no systematic architectural description of coding agents exists comparable to those for compilers or operating systems, the authors document the main components, responsibilities, interactions and execution flow, and release Ark (Agent Research Kit) as a deliberately minimal open-source coding agent for research and teaching. They also introduce ArkBench, a lightweight benchmark of ten representative software maintenance and evolution tasks, on which Ark solved 8 of 10 using gpt-5.4-mini at modest token cost. The paper closes by comparing Ark against state-of-the-art coding agents using a recently proposed architectural taxonomy — useful as a readable reference implementation rather than a performance claim.