Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?

Title:Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?

Abstract:Coding agents are increasingly deployed for iterative development on real repositories, yet existing evaluation barely answers a basic question: \emph{do coding agents reuse existing code or reinvent the wheel?} The question matters: every duplicated implementation is a fix applied twice and agents produce code far faster than humans can audit, so redundancy accumulates unsupervised. Thus, we present \textbf{RepoReuse}, a multi-turn benchmark for auditing code reuse in real repositories, where requirements are revealed turn by turn and the workspace accumulates across turns. It is built by a fully automated pipeline combining AST-based dependency graphs, guided evidence collection, and execution-verified task synthesis, and scales readily to new repositories. Beyond pass rates, we measure the reuse rate together with recall and cross-turn structural redundancy. An audit over 3{,}000 turns shows that agents progressively stop exploring relevant repository code, reuse their own history less even when it is fully in the workspace, and leave duplicated logic in 50.8\% of task chains by turn~5---all while pass rates barely move. Such deficiencies are invisible to pass rates, underscoring the need to evaluate code generation beyond functional correctness.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.35357 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.35357v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35357 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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