Failure as a Process: An Anatomy of CLI Coding Agent Trajectories
Large language model (LLM) coding agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously perform software engineering tasks in terminal-based environments, making their reliability a growing concern. Existing empirical studies investigate why coding agents fail, yet they largely treat failure as a final outcome rather than a temporal process, providing limited insight into how failures emerge, evolve, and become unrecoverable. We present the first large-scale empirical study of CLI coding-agent failure trajectories, introducing a process-oriented framework that analyzes failure through its onset, evolution, and recovery across execution trajectories. We first collect 3,843 execution trajectorie...
| Authors | Xiangxin Zhao, Han Li, Shuaiting Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 10 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 July 2026 |
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