Testing a coding agent
The dangerous coding-agent failure is not a syntax error, which the compiler catches for free. It is the run that reports success on a change that never landed, because nothing in the loop checked whether the write actually happened.
Where coding agents break first
Multi-step edits are the job, so silent abandonment mid-refactor is the first failure; wrong tool calls and a failure it papers over are how it goes unnoticed.
- Stops mid-task without an error
- silently skips steps under ambiguity
- degrades on edge-case inputs.
- Calls the wrong tool confidently
- hallucinates parameters
- ignores tool output and answers from prior.
- Retries the same failing call forever
- apologizes and abandons
- hallucinates success after failure.
Nine probes to run before this one goes near a customer
How the Clinic fixes it
A grade is not a hire decision
The battery grades capability. It does not know your job. An agent can pass all 18 tests and still be wrong for the work — which is why the Hire Check runs your own task, finish the change it was given and say so honestly when it did not, and returns a separate verdict.
Where your samples do not cover a dimension we return NOT TESTED rather than a number. An untested axis reported as a score is the failure this whole product exists to avoid.
// The Clinic's live simulator ships a scripted profile for this archetype (AGT-CODE-03), whose weakest axis is D3 Output Consistency. That profile is a scripted demo, not a measurement of your agent — run the demo scan for a real one.
Grade yours, not an archetype
The $0.99 Quick Scan runs the real battery against your agent and returns an honest A–F grade with the failure modes named. In 24 hours you go from guessing to knowing.