# Online Monitoring and Corrective Steering of Programming Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 27 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16941/) (2025)
- [Plan-and-Act: Improving Planning of Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09572/) (2025)
- [TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08638/) (2025)
- [AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02475/) (2026)
- [LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18970/) (2025)
- [When Agents go Astray: Course-Correcting SWE Agents with PRMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02360/) (2025)
- [Autorubric: A Unifying Framework for Rubric-Based LLM Evaluation on Non-Verifiable Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00077/) (2026)
- [The Long-Horizon Task Mirage? Diagnosing Where and Why Agentic Systems Break](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11978/) (2026)
- [Process-Centric Analysis of Agentic Software Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02393/) (2025)
- [A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05608/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study on Failures in Automated Issue Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13941/) (2025)
- [Wink: Recovering from Misbehaviors in Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17037/) (2026)
- [Beyond Final Code: A Process-Oriented Error Analysis of Software Development Agents in Real-World GitHub Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12374/) (2025)
- [ReCAP: Recursive Context-Aware Reasoning and Planning for Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23822/) (2025)
- [FALAT: Tracing Failures in LLM Agent Trajectories via Dependency-Guided Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00765/) (2026)
- [Can LLM be a Good Path Planner based on Prompt Engineering? Mitigating the Hallucination for Path Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13184/) (2024)
- [Self-Abstraction from Grounded Experience for Plan-Guided Policy Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05931/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Model Potentials Through Adaptive Multi-Agent Scaffolding for Efficient Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25514/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [What Can Component-Replacement Evidence Establish? A Critical Scoping Review of Local Decisions in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39989/) (2026)
- [SWE-Critix: Post-Training Generalist Verifiers for Assessing Coding-Agent Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13356/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fixing GitHub issues in large-scale projects is a long-horizon task, especially when a fix requires changes across multiple locations or the issue description lacks the information needed to localize and repair it. As a result, agents traverse long trajectories that are prone to inefficiency and error: they drift away from their intended plan, repeat failed actions, or terminate without a working patch. This paper proposes LivePlan to monitor, detect, and correct such behavioral inefficiencies and drifts in real time. LivePlan decouples judging from advising: a deterministic, rule-based monitor examines general signals over the trajectory to detect issues without invoking an LLM, and only when an issue is detected does it consult an advisor LLM for a high-level, next-step correction. This design avoids the misleading re-planning and costly interventions of prior approaches. We implement LivePlan on top of SWE-agent and evaluate it using five LLMs (three as executor agents and two as advisors) across SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro. Compared to vanilla SWE-agent, LivePlan notably improves issue resolution rates, achieving consistent gains of up to 15.2% (average: 9.9%), while incurring only an additional cost of 0.08 per instance. The additional solutions concentrate on medium and hard instances. LivePlan consistently outperforms alternative approaches in resolution rate, with minimal regression on already successful runs and new successes on problems that no baseline solves.