Who Decides When theTask Is Done?: Measuring the Effect of Moving Completion Authority from LLMs to Checkers | Zenodo
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Published July 30, 2026
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Who Decides When theTask Is Done?: Measuring the Effect of Moving Completion Authority from LLMs to Checkers
Authors/Creators
Bhatnagar, Kushagra<br>(Researcher)
Description
An LLM agent finishes a task in one of two ways: either the model judges its own
work complete, which we call advisory feedback, or a checker computes completion
and the model’s claim carries no authority, which we call binding feedback. The
distinction matters because an LLM is a generator rather than a verifier. When the
specification is incomplete, it fills the gap from its priors, grades its work against
that reconstructed answer key, and can confidently declare wrong work finished. We
call this failure the false-DONE: the model does not know when it does not know.
Across three preregistered experiments on frozen buggy-Python repair corpora, 2,862
episodes over seven models from five providers at under one dollar of total compute,
we isolate this authority placement as the only varying factor. Binding lifts a weak
model by 9.2 points while leaving a strong one unchanged. Across a seven-model
capability ladder the gain is a window, peaking mid-ladder at +14.9 points, zero
at the ceiling, and negative for the weakest model, which fails by thrashing rather
than false claiming. Raising task difficulty by composing two and three simultaneous
bugs roughly doubles the window’s depth, upto +31.7 points, but never moves its
ceiling : the strongest model produces zero false claims at every difficulty. The window
is therefore a property of the model, not the model–task pair, and the advisory
false-DONE rate mediates the entire effect, which makes the intervention predictable:
a short probe that counts false claims tells a designer in advance whether completion
gating will pay.
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https://github.com/kushagrab21/binding-feedback-experiment
Programming language
Python
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10.5281/zenodo.21698264
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Created
July 30, 2026
Modified
July 30, 2026
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