@inproceedings{yilin-etal-2026-contract,
    title = "Contract-Coding: Towards Repo-Level Generation via Structured Symbolic Paradigm",
    author = "Yilin  and
      Zhao, Lujin  and
      Shi, Yijie",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.400/",
    pages = "8187--8206",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed ``Vibe Coding'') exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47{\%} functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict ``specification-following'' to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding"
}