Where LLM Agents Get Stuck Debugging Databases: Access More Than Reasoning
[Inżynieria oprogramowania] Autorzy: Gustavo Pinto
Large language model (LLM) coding agents are increasingly asked not only to write code but to debug running systems from live runtime data. We report a field observation of one such agent (Claude Code) as it diagnosed eight database incidents in a production message-dispatch engine. In every incident whose root cause depended on runtime concurrency, the agent announced a cause, shipped a fix, and later walked it back, and each wrong guess cost a deploy-and-observe cycle. Mapping each incident to what the agent lacked, we find that access to production state was the most pervasive bottleneck. The missing access included live lock views, untruncated deadlock reports, read-only execution, and an explicit environment context. An access gap was present in all five concurrency-dependent incidents: alone in one, and in four combined with a reasoning error such as anchoring on an early cause, i…
- Kategoria arxiv
- cs.SE
- Kategoria
- Inżynieria oprogramowania