AI coding agents back up files before risky changes only 15.2% of the time

Researchers built 205 tasks from cases where users said they regretted not saving something an agent later changed. Six frontier models finished 86.1% of tasks on average but backed up the affected files, environments or settings beforehand only 15.2% of the time. An add-on backup layer the team built covered every such action.

Photo: ajay_suresh / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped)

Sources

• Research arXiv（査読前） (2026-10-20)
  Back Up Before You Regret: Measuring Backup Awareness and Automating Backup in Coding Agents

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