What's this about?
Paper-to-code reproduction asks agents to turn a research paper into an executable repository that preserves the method, protocol and artifacts. It is hard because the specification is split: part of it lives in the prose, part in the artifacts, and neither is complete. ReproAgent uses explicit contracts to bridge the two.
What is a "contract" here?
A machine-checkable statement of what a component must do, agreed before it is written — inputs, outputs, invariants. In reproduction, the contract makes the paper's implicit claims explicit, so the agent has something to verify against instead of a vibe. Without it, "reproduced" means "produced something that runs", which is not the same thing at all.
Why does this matter to you?
- Reproduction is the highest-value, least-glamorous work in research, and it is genuinely well-suited to agents.
- The split-specification problem — prose plus artifacts, neither complete — is the same problem as working from a half-written internal design doc.
- Contracts are a transferable idea: they are the mechanism that makes agent output checkable rather than merely plausible.