Measuring LLM Trust Allocation Across Conflicting Software Artifacts

arXiv:2604.03447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based software engineering assistants fail not only by producing incorrect outputs, but also by allocating trust to the wrong artifact when code, documentation, and tests disagree. Existing evaluations focus mainly on downstream outcomes and therefore cannot reveal whether a model recognized degraded evidence, identified the unreliable source, or calibrated its trust across artifacts. We present TRACE (Trust Reasoning over Artifacts for Calib