Chronicle: Cut-Point Replay for Regression Testing of LLM Agents
Published 18 Sept 2026arXiv:2609.20625
Updated 4 h ago · first seen 18 Sept 2026
paper_01M2SEGH9R02FNC6KTXCW73PYS
Abstract
Large language model responses are non-deterministic, so failures in LLM agents are hard to reproduce: a failure depends on inference that is not bitwise reproducible, on tools that read changing state, and on a multi-step trajectory that a re-run rarely repeats. Record-and-replay makes a run reproducible, but existing agent tooling records runs only to trace or score them, not to test a code change against them. We present Chronicle, which records an agent run at its non-deterministic boundaries as immutable envelopes and replays it from the record. Its central operation, cut-point replay, serves a chosen subset of boundaries from the record and executes the complementary subset live with new code, turning a recorded incident into a regression test that runs in continuous integration. On a benchmark of 6 recorded failures with simulated model boundaries, recording adds 23 {\mu}s per crossing (0.008% of an assumed 300 ms model call), full replay issues zero model calls and is bit-stable across 20 repetitions, and cut-point tests fail on faulty code and pass on guarded and benign changes for all 6 incidents. In a mutation study of the guarded tools, cut-point tests catch every mutant that lets the recorded unsafe action through, while a baseline that stubs every boundary, using the same assertion, catches none. Chronicle and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/theagentplane/chronicle.
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Chronicle: Cut-Point Replay for Regression Testing of LLM Agents: arxiv announce type changed from new to cross
Arxiv announce typenew→crossarxivNew paper: Chronicle: Cut-Point Replay for Regression Testing of LLM Agents
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