DDBench: A Benchmark for Agentic Debugging on Distributed Systems

원문 초록

LLM-based coding agents have advanced rapidly on single-process SWE tasks, with frontier models now clustering in the high-70s on SWE-bench Verified. Distributed-system debugging, however, remains an under-explored regime: bugs span processes, nodes, and protocol interactions, with root causes rarely recoverable from source alone and brute-force exploration intractable across non-deterministic interleavings. This leaves two gaps in LLM and agent evaluation: no code-repair benchmark targets distributed-system bugs, and no controlled study isolates how much externally provided debugging context changes agent success on them. We introduce DDBench, a code-repair benchmark of 60 historical bugs mined from 13 open-source distributed systems, partitioned into three reasoning-scope tiers. DDBench evaluates every case under two matched conditions: a symptom-only condition where the agent receives only the bug symptom and repository, and a context-augmented condition where it additionally receives bounded debugging context (logs, traces, runtime state, and targeted code-investigation notes), isolating the effect of debugging context from model capability. The evaluation of 10 LLMs on DDBench reveals several findings. First, distributed debugging exercises a reasoning dimension that single-process benchmarks do not surface: models' pass rates span 45 pp, and pairwise bootstrap separates 6 of 15 top-tier model pairs at p < 0.05 on DDBench's hardest case-set. Second, bounded debugging context lifts aggregate pass rate by +19.0 pp, and the lift is asymmetric: weaker models gain more in pass rate, while stronger models gain more in efficiency. Third, debugging context requires careful curation, as even faithful debugging context can anchor a strong model on the wrong layer of the system when its observation sits far from the fault.