What Context Does a Coding Agent Actually Need to Act?
A modern coding agent can hold an entire repository in its context window. Most of its reading is wasted -- and the interesting question is not how much context an agent can use, but what it actually \emph{needs}. We study that question at the moment it matters most: when the agent must \emph{edit} code. Separating \emph{finding} the work site from \emph{acting} on it, we hold localization fixed with an oracle, vary only how the code is represented, and score context against real issue resolution on SWE-bench Verified. The answer is starkly minimal. The signal lives in the code being edited itself: natural-language summaries of it answer almost none of the behavioral questions that the so...
| Authors | Brian Sam-Bodden |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 June 2026 |
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