Pierce, Sorin Lerner, Harrison Goldstein, and Nadia Polikarpova describe “decision-oriented programming” in an arXiv paper revised on 19 October 2026. The proposed workflow makes design decisions an explicit, structured medium between a programmer and a coding agent.
The authors built Aporia as a design probe for the approach. It keeps a persistent, editable Decision Bank; asks proactive design questions; and encodes each recorded decision as a test suite intended to validate an agent’s implementation. The paper frames these decisions as co-authored interactively and traceable to code.
A study involving 14 programmers found that structuring collaboration around decisions kept participants and agents in sync during the design process. The source does not establish that Aporia is publicly released, that the approach improves code quality or delivery speed, or that the result will generalize beyond this study. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05203