Credit-Budgeted ICPC-Style Coding: When Agents Must Pay for Every Decision

arXiv:2604.10182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current evaluations of autonomous coding agents assume an unrealistic, infinite-resource environment. However, real-world software engineering is a resource-bound competition. As we scale toward large agent swarms, ignoring compute and time costs risks catastrophic budget exhaustion. To shift the focus from isolated accuracy to cost-aware problem-solving, we introduce USACOArena, an interactive ACM-ICPC-style arena driven by a strict "credit" econo