The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle bug fixing versus problem solving in competitive programming. Using a dataset of ~3,000 Codeforces submissions and their human fixes, the authors compare LLM-generated patches to human patches and assess whether LLMs prefer to modify buggy code or generate new solutions. Results show that LLMs often alter more lines than necessary and sometimes produce entirely new solutions, performing better when allowed to generate solutions from scratch rather than patching existing code.
By Alexandru Stefan Stoica, Traian Rebedea, Marian Cristian Mihaescu
arXiv:2507. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated Program Repair (APR) seeks to automatically correct software bugs without requiring human intervention.
By Marcos Fuster-Pena, David de-Fitero-Dominguez, Antonio Garcia-Cabot, Eva Garcia-Lopez
arXiv:2607. 00990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based software engineering agents are increasingly developed to resolve software issues by generating patches from issue reports and code repositories.
By Yaoqi Guo, Yang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Yun Ma, Yiling Lou, Zhenpeng Chen
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.
By Yibo Yan, Huijuan Wang, Junzhou He, Yizhuo Liang, Shaoyu Wang, Huanchen Sun, Seo Jin Park
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:2608. 14065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Software bugs remain a critical challenge in development, necessitating effective Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques.
By Junchi Liu, Ali Bigdeli, Roya Daneshi, Atu Ambala, Sudipto Ghosh, Fabio Santos
arXiv:2607. 19653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents now perform well on correctness-oriented repository-level tasks, including SWE-Bench issue resolution and feature implementation in real codebases.
By Ryan Deng, Yuanzhe Liu, Bastian Lipka, Yao Ma, Xuhao Chen, Tim Kaler, Jatin Ganhotra
arXiv:2512. 18552v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While current software agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and agentic reinforcement learning (RL) can boost programmer productivity, their training data (e.
By Yuxiang Wei, Zhiqing Sun, Emily McMilin, Jonas Gehring, David Zhang, Gabriel Synnaeve, Daniel Fried, Lingming Zhang, Sida Wang
arXiv:2607. 00700v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLVM is a widely used compiler infrastructure whose scale and complexity make issue resolution labor-intensive and challenging.
By Zhao Tian, Yingquan Zhao, Chenyao Suo, Meng Wang, Junjie Chen
The paper presents a systematic analysis of five state‑of‑the‑art automated program repair agents, tracing their decision‑making across 500 real‑world repair tasks. It finds that while the agents perform well on simple fixes, they struggle with logic‑intensive bugs, often producing verbose, overfitted patches that pass tests without addressing root causes. Key bottlenecks identified include poor test generation, limited regression test selection, and reliance on primitive tooling without access to debuggers or advanced program analysis tools.
By Ira Ceka, Hailie Mitchell, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Shyam Ramji, Junfeng Yang, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray
Large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in software development, with LLM-based automated program repair tools increasingly used during code review. In this report, we explore the iterativ...
arXiv:2607. 27146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents have made substantial progress on software engineering tasks that modify existing codebases, including bug fixing and feature implementation.
By Yihao Chen, Shi Chang, Khaled Chawa, Feng Lin, Boyuan Chen, Shaowei Wang, Ahmed E. Hassan