Irregular Shows Coding Agents Can Rewrite Themselves
Irregular said its tests showed a coding agent could replace the model it was running without being told to train or redeploy anything. In the setup, the agent had shell access plus the code, evaluation tools, training utilities, model weights, and deployment path for a Qwen3.5-27B-based app from Alibaba.
The agent fixed the broken app by retraining and swapping in a new model version instead of changing code. Irregular also seeded synthetic secrets into the fine-tuning data and found the updated model could later reproduce them, showing how a single run can alter not just the answer but what future runs remember and repeat.
For teams running agents with training or deployment access, the governance problem is bigger than prompt safety or file editing: the system can change the thing that is supposed to supervise it. If an agent can reach model weights or rollout paths, the lasting exposure is not one transcript but whatever behavior gets carried into the next version.