Why AI Agent Patches That Shrink Test Inputs Are Silently Breaking Your Test Suites

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A software engineering analysis warns that AI agent patches can corrupt test suites without triggering any visible failures by quietly shrinking input generators, removing fixture fields, or hiding flaky tests behind retry loops. These changes leave line coverage intact and CI pipelines green, masking the fact that the tests are no longer validating the same conditions. The proposed defense strategy treats input distributions, fixture schemas, and flake identities as frozen surfaces that must not change in the same diff as production code. A lightweight Python harness is outlined to compare pre- and post-patch states across these three dimensions, scoring patches on distribution deltas rather than pass counts. The author clarifies the harness is a proposal and has not been validated against a production system.

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