English

How and Why Agents Can Identify Bug-Introducing Commits

Software Engineering 2026-04-01 v1

Abstract

\'Sliwerski, Zimmermann, and Zeller (SZZ) just won the 2026 ACM SIGSOFT Impact Award for asking: When do changes induce fixes? Their paper from 2005 served as the foundation for a wide array of approaches aimed at identifying bug-introducing changes (or commits) from fix commits in software repositories. But even after two decades of progress, the best-performing approach from 2025 yields a modest increase of 10 percentage points in F1-score on the most popular Linux kernel dataset. In this paper, we uncover how and why LLM-based agents can substantially advance the state-of-the-art in identifying bug-introducing commits from fix commits. We propose a simple agentic workflow based on searching a set of candidate commits and find that it raises the F1-score from 0.64 to 0.81 on the most popular Linux kernel dataset, a bigger jump than between the original 2005 method (0.54) and the previous SOTA (0.64). We also uncover why agents are so successful: They derive short greppable patterns from the fix commit diff and message and use them to effectively search and find bug-introducing commits in large candidate sets. Finally, we also discuss how these insights might enable further progress in bug detection, root cause understanding, and repair.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.29378,
  title  = {How and Why Agents Can Identify Bug-Introducing Commits},
  author = {Niklas Risse and Marcel Böhme},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.29378},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:45:40.981Z