Specification Grounding Drives Test Effectiveness for LLM Code

Abstract: Large language models frequently generate code that appears correct on typical inputs yet fails on edge cases, invalid inputs, and other specification-defined corner conditions. A popular fix has the model write its own tests and repair until they pass, but the source of the gain is unclear: does it come from the tests merely existing, or from their grounding in a specification of what the code should do? We isolate this factor. Holding the tester, test budget, and repair loop fixed, we change a single prompt line that controls whether the tester receives the spec as a checklist of rules. The baseline is strong: it is already told to probe invalid inputs and edge cases. Grounding the tests in the spec produces correct code +38 percentage points more often than this baseline across three Claude tiers (Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8), and +36 points on a held-out set. Grounding, not test quantity, is the primary driver: doubling the test budget barely helps, and combining eight independent ungrounded suites plateaus far below grounding. An ablation isolates the spec's content, not its format: given the spec as a plain paragraph the tester recovers 27 of 30 bugs, but asked to plan tests without the spec it recovers only 2 of 30. The effect survives stronger baselines: a property-based generator catches 28 of 30 bugs but invents out-of-spec requirements, and an AlphaCodium-style loop only matches the baseline. It replicates across vendors (GPT-5.3-codex +28, Gemini 3.5 Flash +19), with a task-level sign test over 18 tasks significant at p=0.002. Grounding improves both sensitivity and precision: it catches more real bugs and wrongly rejects far less correct code, cutting the false-alarm rate from 33% (68% against a Python standard-library oracle) to 0%. On well-specified algorithmic problems it neither helps nor hurts.

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