LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks where an existing codebase provides context, but constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. Recent benchmarks such as ProgramBench quantify this gap: given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary as a behavioral oracle, even frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances.
arXiv:2512. 22256v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software issue resolution aims to address real-world issues in software repositories based on natural language descriptions provided by users, and represents a key aspect of software maintenance.
By Zhonghao Jiang, David Lo, Zhongxin Liu
arXiv:2608. 09072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-powered coding agents are increasingly used to modify existing code repositories, for example, by adding features or fixing bugs.
By Xin Zhou, Chun Yong Chong, Kisub Kim, Yun Peng, Rui Shu, Zihan Wu, Xu Han, Guowen Yuan, Zeyang Zhuang, Jounghoon Kim, Jeongjin Ju, Seongmin Ju, Taein Yoon, David Lo
arXiv:2607. 02057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents raise the level of abstraction in software development by shifting the focus from writing precise procedures to expressing intents and goals.
By Florian Tambon, Michael Konstantinou, Cedric Richter, Charles Chenouard, Mark Harman, Mike Papadakis
arXiv:2509. 24148v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside implementation.
By Yiran Hu, Nan Jiang, Shanchao Liang, Yi Wu, Lin Tan
arXiv:2501. 07892v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in automated code generation, with few-shot prompting widely used for its simplicity and effectiveness.
By Shengsheng Zhou, Shuai Wang, Liang Ding, Yibing Zhan, Yong Luo, Zheng He, Fu Lin, Dapeng Tao
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation, yet ensuring correctness in complex, repository-level tasks remains challenging. Existing approaches often use generated tests as static post-hoc validators, which limits their ability to guide implementation and may introduce misleading feedback when the tests themselves are incomplete or incorrect.
arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.
By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv:2602. 22480v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An important emerging application of coding agents is agent harness optimization: the iterative improvement of a target agent by editing and evaluating its code.
By Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue, Samuel Marc Denton
arXiv:2506. 13932v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks.
By Saurabh Pujar, Ira Ceka, Irene Manotas, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray, Shyam Ramji
arXiv:2603. 05026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language model (LM) agents have driven substantial progress in automated software engineering (SWE), yet building and testing software repositories at scale remains a largely manual and labor-intensive bottleneck.
By Kenan Li, Rongzhi Li, Linghao Zhang, Qirui Jin, Liao Zhu, Xiaosong Huang, Geng Zhang, Yikai Zhang, Shilin He, Chengxing Xie, Xin Zhang, Zijian Jin, Bowen Li, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang, Yufan Huang, Elsie Nallipogu, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.
By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang