Agents reported thousands of bugs, how many were real? - Ian Butler and Nick Gregory

Introduction to Software Agents 00:00

• The popularity of software engineering agents has surged recently, prompting an investigation into their effectiveness in bug detection and maintenance.
• Ian Butler and Nick Gregory introduce themselves and their backgrounds in data engineering, machine learning, and software security.

Benchmark Overview 01:09

• The presenters discuss a new benchmark designed to evaluate software agents beyond typical feature development tasks.
• Existing benchmarks are limited to feature development and do not cover the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), including code review and maintenance.

Challenges in Bug Detection 02:34

• Software agents currently struggle with holistic code evaluation, often missing bugs that human developers would easily catch.
• Existing bug detection benchmarks are outdated, focusing on simplistic security issues rather than a variety of bug types.

Development of the New Benchmark SM 05:18

• Bismouth created a benchmark of 100 validated bugs from 84 public repositories, focusing on various bug types and programming languages (Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go).
• The benchmark excludes subjective issues like feature requests and code style to maintain objectivity.

Benchmark Metrics 07:48

• Key metrics include the agents' ability to discover bugs without prior knowledge, the false positive rate, and their effectiveness in identifying bugs at the time of introduction.
• The agents are also assessed on their ability to propose fixes for identified bugs.

Performance Comparison of Agents 11:05

• Basic agents often report high false positive rates, making them unreliable for effective bug triage.
• Bismouth's agents outperform competitors in bug detection, but the overall effectiveness of many agents remains low.

Insights on Agent Limitations 15:09

• Many agents demonstrate narrow thinking and fail to evaluate code deeply, limiting their effectiveness in bug detection.
• A consistent number of bugs are reported across runs, but the actual bugs identified vary, indicating a lack of holistic evaluation.

Conclusion and Future Directions 17:05

• Despite advancements, current agents are prone to introducing bugs, highlighting the importance of improving reasoning capabilities and context usage in bug detection.
• Bismouth expresses optimism for future progress in the industry and encourages further development in agent capabilities.