# Does an AI coding agent fix its own mistakes?

Rarely on its own. A study of 20,574 real coding-agent sessions found the agent almost never caught a mistake unprompted: a developer had to flag the problem 91.49% of the time before the agent went and fixed it, against just 2.99% where the agent self-corrected with no pushback at all, and 5.52% where the developer ended up fixing it directly instead. The misalignment took seven recurring forms: misreading the project, misreading intent, breaking a stated rule, overstepping its bounds, a bad implementation, a malformed command or tool call, and misreporting its own progress. Most of these episodes, 90.50%, cost extra effort and eroded trust rather than causing damage that couldn't be undone.

That's the rate for mistakes a person already caught. [What happens to the ones nobody notices](/answers/silent-failures/what-is-a-silent-failure-in-an-ai-agent) is a separate, harder question this study doesn't answer, since it only counted episodes visible enough to draw a developer's pushback in the first place.

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Sources:
- "How Coding Agents Fail Their Users: A Large-Scale Analysis of Developer-Agent Misalignment in 20,574 Real-World Sessions" (arXiv:2605.29442): https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29442 (fetched 2026-09-25)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/agent-reliability/does-an-ai-coding-agent-fix-its-own-mistakes
More on Agent reliability: https://tessary.ai/answers/agent-reliability
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai