The paper investigates how AI code agents perform when the surrounding code is rewritten in a semantically equivalent way. Using a random variant sampler that applies control‑flow rewrites, dead‑code injection, and identifier renaming, the authors evaluate two agent scaffolds—mini‑SWE agent and OpenCode—backed by four frontier models across SWE‑bench datasets. Results show modest drops in resolve‑rate (up to 6.7 percentage points) with significant degradations in 6 of 16 configurations, and reveal that robustness varies across models and scaffolds, forming a jagged frontier.
AI code agents are increasingly deployed to resolve real software issues, yet their reliability under superficial code variations remains poorly understood. We evaluate whether coding agents that repa...
arXiv:2507. 11059v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset.
arXiv:2607. 03691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agentic scaffolding: 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:2607. 18161v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents are increasingly used to accelerate code generation in many downstream tasks, such as fixing bugs, building applications, and prototyping.
arXiv:2608. 14863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents have advanced rapidly on single-process SWE tasks, with frontier models now clustering in the high-70s on SWE-bench Verified.
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.
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:2610.09079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models equipped with development environments have moved code generation toward repository-scale construction, yet building complete r...
E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.
arXiv:2606. 12344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring.
Schr"odinger's Repository (Schr"odingerRepo) is an evaluation framework that tests coding agents on dynamically instantiated repository representations to mitigate data leakage from static repository benchmarks. It transforms test repositories through four levels—problem statement reconstruction, namespace remapping, intra-file layout reordering, and functionality-preserving code rewriting—to obscure familiar cues while preserving executable behavior. Experiments on popular LLMs using SWE-bench Verified and SWE-QA show that removing these cues consistently degrades performance and increases interaction costs, mainly due to harder repository exploration and localization.
The paper investigates code-level autonomous research loops (ARLs) where a language model edits training pipelines to improve an in-loop metric. It identifies a failure mode called algorithmic mode collapse, where edits become semantically uniform despite surface diversity, leading to a growing gap between in-loop gains and independent evaluation. The authors propose Diversity‑Aware Proposal Sampling (DAPS), a lightweight method that reduces semantic decay by 69.1% and boosts faithfulness by over 80% while maintaining optimization speed.