Quite a surprising result: “across multiple coding agents and LLMs, we find that context files tend to reduce task success rates compared to providing no repository context, while also increasing inference cost by over 20%.”
Hey, paper author here.
We did try to get an even sample - we include both SWE-bench repos (which are large, popular and mostly human-written) and a sample of smaller, more recent repositories with existing AGENTS.md (these tend to contain LLM written code of course). Our findings generalize across both these samples. What is arguably missing are small repositories of completely human-written code, but this is quite difficult to obtain nowadays.
To reduce the number of variables to account for. To be able to finish the paper this year, and not the next century. To work with a familiar language and environments. To use a language heavily represented in the training data.
All research is conducted in constraints. It's not hard to understand those constraints by simply thinking.
Besides, one could actually open the research, and scroll to section 5 where they acknowledge the need to expand beyond Python:
--- start quote ---
5. Limitations and Future Work
While our work addresses important shortcomings in the literature, exciting opportunities for future research remain.
# Niche programming languages
The current evaluation is focused heavily on Python. Since this is a language that is widely represented in the training data, much detailed knowledge about tooling, dependencies, and other repository specifics might be present in the models’ parametric knowledge, nullifying the effect of context files. Future work may investigate the effect of context files on more niche programming languages and toolchains that are less represented in the training data, and known to be more difficult for LLMs
I think that is a rather fitting approach to the problem domain. A task being a real GitHub issue is a solid definition by any measure, and I see no problem picking language A over B or C.
If you feel strongly about the topic, you are free to write your own article.
