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
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: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. 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:2604. 11950v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While recent LLM-based agents can identify many candidate bugs in source code, their reports remain static hypotheses that require manual validation, limiting the practicality of automated bug detection.
By Zijie Zhao, Chenyuan Yang, Weidong Wang, Yihan Yang, Ziqi Zhang, Lingming Zhang
arXiv:2609.37864v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agent harness bugs exhibit unique characteristics and remain challenging for state-of-the-art software agents to repair. Progress in this area is fur...
By Yiming Cheng (The University of Chicago), Alfin Wijaya Rahardja (Fudan University), Mengshi Zhang (TensorBlock, Inc), Zihao Chen (TensorBlock, Inc), Zhenpeng Chen (Tsinghua University), Yiling Lou (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
arXiv:2607. 25873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automated Program Repair systems are advancing rapidly, yet their performance remains inconsistent.
By Ramtin Ehsani, Irene Manotas, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Preetha Chatterjee
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. 12605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have improved automated program repair (APR), but two limitations remain.
By Zhili Huang, Ling Xu, Hongyu Zhang
arXiv:2507. 11059v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset.
By Pavel Adamenko, Mikhail Ivanov, Aidar Valeev, Rodion Levichev, Pavel Zadorozhny, Ivan Lopatin, Dmitry Babaev, Alena Fenogenova, Valentin Malykh
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:2609.36635v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Bug validation asks a coding agent to produce an executable witness for a reported bug. The witness combines a concrete input with a testing harness...
By Haomin Qi, Xiangzhe Xu, Yiming Huang, Jingbo Shang, Chengpeng Wang