Coding agents 'know' where their edits are heading, 25 steps early.

Logistic-regression probes on a coding agent's hidden states can decode whether code will parse and pass tests at AUC up to 0.83, and those internal representations run ahead of the agent's own edits, predicting outcomes as much as 25 steps in advance (arXiv). The authors call it a latent programming horizon, and the probes transferred across two models and two benchmarks without retraining. The practical hook: if the agent internally represents a doomed trajectory before it finishes writing it, you could probe and early-stop bad runs instead of paying for the full failure. Interpretability that's actually actionable, which is rarer than the papers suggest.