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.
By Ebtesam Al-Haque, Brittany Johnson
arXiv:2606. 17799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration.
By Maria I. Gorinova, Macey Baker, Amy Heineike, Maksim Shaposhnikov, Rob Willoughby, Dru Knox
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:2606. 16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there.
By Hamidah Oderinwale
arXiv:2607. 07946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents.
By Wenqi Huang, Charley Lee, Leonard Tng, Serena Ge
arXiv:2607. 06411v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Developers increasingly delegate real maintenance work to product-grade coding agents, and many state tasks in their native language, in the style of a customer request rather than a curated English issue.
By Evgeny Shilov (Independent Researcher)
arXiv:2608. 00355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Progress in large language models is often summarized using a single scalar measure, such as a time horizon, a latent ability estimate, or an aggregate benchmark score.
By Hanwen Xing, Pengyun Wang, BingXu Meng, Kumail Alhamoud, Xiang Li, Jicheng Wang, Xin Yu, Xinyang Han, Xiaomin Li, Philip Torr, Yuexing Hao
arXiv:2606. 22678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic coding harnesses - such as Agent-Skills, Superpowers, and Agent-Rigor - are increasingly deployed to augment underlying LLMs for real-world software engineering tasks.
By Meher Bhaskar Madiraju, Meher Sai Preetam Madiraju
arXiv:2606. 28235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous coding agents now open and merge pull requests in shared repositories at scale, and the field evaluates them the way it has always evaluated components, one agent at a time, on isolated benchmark tasks.
By Daniel Russo
arXiv:2608. 13598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent evaluation relies almost entirely on outcome metrics such as success rate, which capture whether an agent succeeds but not how consistently it behaves.
By Amritesh Banerjee, Pranil Raichura
Developers increasingly delegate real maintenance work to product-grade coding agents, and many state tasks in their native language, in the style of a customer request rather than a curated English issue. Existing repository-level agentic benchmarks do not measure this setting: their task statements are English by design.
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.
By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan