AgentBug-Smith: Automatically Reproducing Real-World Harness Bugs in Agentic Systems

Abstract

Agent harness bugs exhibit unique characteristics and remain challenging for state-of-the-art software agents to repair. Progress in this area is further hindered by existing benchmarks, which contain only a small and fixed number of executable harness bugs while requiring hundreds of human hours to construct. This work presents AgentBug-Smith, an automated harness bug reproduction approach that continuously discovers and reproduces real-world harness bugs from open-source agentic systems. Across different backbone LLMs, AgentBug-Smith consistently outperforms existing bug reproduction techniques designed for general software, achieving 10.67% - 27.56% higher success rates of reproducing harness bugs. By applying AgentBug-Smith to open-source agentic systems in the wild, we construct Live-Harness-Bench, a live and extensible benchmark that currently contains 200 reproducible harness bugs. We further demonstrate the utility of Live-Harness-Bench through two downstream applications. First, we use Live-Harness-Bench as the evaluation benchmark to systematically evaluate state-of-the-art software agents, revealing their limited capabilities in repairing real-world harness bugs. Second, we use Live-Harness-Bench as a knowledge base of real-world harness bug fixes, from which reusable repair skills can be distilled to improve existing software agents, increasing their harness-bug repair rates by 6.32%. Together, AgentBug-Smith and Live-Harness-Bench establish a scalable foundation for continuously evaluating and improving software agents on harness bug repair, turning real-world agent failures into executable evaluation instances and reusable knowledge for harness improvement, thus contributing to the ultimate goal of recursively self-improving agents.