The paper investigates what makes software issue resolution tasks difficult for agents by proposing a measurement framework and conducting a large‑scale empirical study on the CoderForge‑Preview dataset. It extracts static features from task patches, repositories, and prompts, and uses ensemble methods, SHAP attribution, and effect size analysis to predict task outcomes. The study finds that task difficulty is largely predictable from static features (AU C = 0.863), driven mainly by patch fragmentation and repository scale, with prompt linguistic features contributing for mid‑band tasks, suggesting a layered difficulty structure.
arXiv:2604. 00594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the focus in LLM-based coding shifts from static single-step code generation to multi-step agentic interaction with tools and environments, understanding which tasks will challenge agents and why becomes increasingly difficult.
arXiv:2608. 04682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in software engineering (SWE) scenarios, capable of fixing a specific bug in large-scale codebase.
The evaluation of coding agents generally strives to be as realistic as possible. In our study, we collect 4,782 agent sessions of real software engineers in JetBrains IDEs, which we call Production S...
arXiv:2609.01271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic software engineering benchmarks are typically summarized by nominal category labels such as "bug fix" or "feature implementation," yet benchm...
arXiv:2610.09633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The evaluation of coding agents generally strives to be as realistic as possible. In our study, we collect 4,782 agent sessions of real software engine...
arXiv:2606.21804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding age...
arXiv:2606. 16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there.
arXiv:2610.13361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As the production of software passes into the hands of software itself, coding agents are increasingly commissioned to build agents fitted to their u...
The paper introduces CABRA, a synthetic benchmark that constructs coding tasks from scratch using call‑graph transformations and scales difficulty along four axes: function traversal, search, runtime resolution, and instruction following. Experiments with eight large language models and six coding agents on 6,840 CABRA tasks show that while LLM accuracy degrades with task size, agents maintain high performance by leveraging tools; larger tasks trigger more tool calls, and a separate study on SWE‑bench verifies that tool‑call counts better predict agent accuracy than lines of code edited. The authors argue that CABRA exposes weaknesses in LLMs that are hidden by tool use and highlights the importance of code‑understanding abilities beyond mere editing. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that coding agents’ performance is more dependent on code‑understanding than on the amount of code edited, revealing a critical bottleneck for current coding agents."
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 05797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task difficulty dictates an agent's likelihood of success, and estimating it without rollouts means forecasting this directly from a task description before executing costly simulations in stateful environments.