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Pdb or Not to Be: Comparing Debugging Interfaces With Pass$_{X}$@$k$

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Based on a feed excerpt; full article content has not been acquired. Source evidence retrieved 09/11/2026, 05:03:25 UTC.

Briefings

A study compares debugging interfaces against bash-only agents on 500 SWE-bench Verified instances using GPT-OSS-120B and Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B models. The research introduces pass$_X$@$k$ to isolate interface specialization from scaffold changes, revealing that bash rollouts outperform combined bash-debugger pairs due to run-to-run variance rather than tool complementarity.

Key points

• Two bash rollouts outperform the combination of one bash and one debugger rollout on SWE-bench Verified instances.
• The pass$_X$@$k$ estimator shows that bash and debugger agents solve disjoint subsets of the benchmark primarily due to stochastic variance.

Context

Interactive debuggers are essential for human software development, yet coding agents typically rely on edit-execute-observe loops using bash tools. This study isolates the contribution of debugging interfaces by comparing them against bash-only agents on 500 SWE-bench Verified instances.

Limitations

The study uses preprint arXiv:2611.08666v1 with limited coverage of 500 SWE-bench Verified instances. Results are based on three independent runs per model configuration and may vary across different sampling conditions.

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