The paper explores whether natural‑language documentation aids coding agents in fixing software bugs and introduces a roundtrip benchmark that evaluates code descriptions by regenerating code and testing it. It finds that description completeness, not length, determines fidelity, and presents an optimizer that can produce fully faithful descriptions that generalize to new files. However, experiments across two model families and ten repositories show that such compact documentation does not improve an agent’s ability to resolve real repository issues compared to using the issue alone.
By Md Shohel Arman, Igor Molybog
arXiv:2608.29675v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Repository exploration is a distinct and costly stage of coding-agent pipelines: before generating a patch, an agent must identify which repository f...
By Mohammad Nour Al Awad, Sergey Ivanov
Modern coding agents can deliver increasingly large repository-level changes, and recent benchmarks reflect this by emphasizing long-horizon tasks with large reference implementations. Many benchmarks...
arXiv:2609.37143v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern coding agents can deliver increasingly large repository-level changes, and recent benchmarks reflect this by emphasizing long-horizon tasks wi...
By Yun Peng, Zihan Wu, Zeyang Zhuang, Xin Zhou, Rui Shu, Xu Han, Chun Yong Chong, Yuan Wang, Jiakun Liu
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...
By Shaswat Patel, Betty Li Hou, Arun Purohit, Kai Xu, Jane Pan, He He, Valerie Chen
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.
By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou
arXiv:2607. 01916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents can repair real repository issues, but they often spend large context budgets on whole-file reads, broad searches, and long terminal outputs where useful evidence is mixed with irrelevant code and logs.
By Chiwang Luk, Matin Mohammad Najafi, Zhifeng Jia, Wei Yang, Xiuchang Li, Jinwei Zhu, Yang Ren, Lei Chen, Gao Cong
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
Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step.
arXiv:2607. 09691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A modern coding agent can hold an entire repository in its context window.
By Brian Sam-Bodden
arXiv:2606. 11976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue.
By Akeela Darryl Fattha, Kia Ying Chua, Lingxiao Jiang, Laura Wynter
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