Code Understanding is a Bottleneck for Coding Agents
Repository benchmarks (e.g., SWE-bench) for coding agents often assume that lines of code edited can predict task difficulty, but such datasets' poor control over code and task types makes it hard to know which abilities truly drive agent errors. We present CABRA: a Coding Ability Blueprint for Rigorous Agent evaluation. CABRA builds tasks from scratch as call graph transformations and scales difficulty via a task size parameter on four axes: function traversal, search, runtime resolution, and instruction following. We run eight LLMs and six coding agents on 6,840 CABRA tasks to show: 1) LLM accuracy falls as task size~grows, but agents stay near-perfect by offloading work to tools (e.g.,...
| Authors | Nishant Balepur, Kiran Tomlinson, Tobias Schnabel |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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