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: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:2607. 07946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents.
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 13228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses combine retrieval, routing, state, provenance, and verification, but locally successful components may disagree on shared state.
arXiv:2608. 04804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier language models can resolve repository-level software issues, but each attempt is expensive, and existing routers select a model from the issue text alone.