Coding agents now interleave LLMs with retrieval over the working repository, and retrieval implementations vary widely across deployed harnesses. Inside a fixed coding-agent harness on a fixed model, does adding a structural codebase index actually change cost or resolve?
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...
arXiv:2607. 10569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern coding agents expose multiple tool surfaces -- IDE primitives, bash, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) code-execution -- and the field has shipped three contradictory claims about which one matters.
Modern LLM coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenHands share a common inefficiency: they spend much of their token budget finding the file to patch, rather than patching it. On SWE-Bench Verified, a 30B OpenHands agent averages 23 rounds and 631K tokens per resolved issue, with many calls spent on grep, glob, and view_file during repository exploration.
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.
arXiv:2607. 00016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information localization within massive repositories is a cornerstone of agentic LLM systems.
arXiv:2608. 05886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenHands share a common inefficiency: they spend much of their token budget finding the file to patch, rather than patching it.
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: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...
arXiv:2607. 07946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents.
The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.
arXiv:2607. 28545v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can write, patch, and search code, but oncall root cause analysis (RCA) demands something different: reasoning over noisy metrics, logs, traces, and source code, starting from ambiguous user-facing reports, often hours after the incident began.
arXiv:2607. 09691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A modern coding agent can hold an entire repository in its context window.