arXiv:2606.20158cs.SE
N-Version Programming with Coding Agents
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Abstract
This paper revisits the classical concept on N-version programming in the setting of contemporary AI coding agents. Revisiting the seminal Knight-Leveson experiment, we study whether diversity across agent systems, models, and implementation languages creates diverse failure modes. Using the Knight-Leveson's, Launch Interceptor Program Specification, we evaluate 48 agent-generated implementations on a shared oracle and a campaign of 1,000,000 randomized test inputs. The results show substantial common-mode failure, along the findings of Knight-Leveson. Further analysis that many of those co-occuring failures can be traced to where is specification is particularly hard or ambiguous. We also demonstrate that diversity from coding agents provides practical benefit: across majority voting three-version units, the mean failure count drops from 387.44 for single versions to 130.99 for triples, and 11,844 N-version units exhibit zero observed failures. Our original results is the strongest evidence to date that N-Version Programming with coding agents is a useful engineering strategy.
> You aren’t thinking this through. No need to be so polite; I might just be very stupid. > You were just told that this wasn’t stacking but you keep insisting it is. Having an LLM generate something and then asking another LLM to generate that something is asking for 2…
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