Chronos helps code agents search connected project history
In plain words
Code agents can read a project’s current files, but those files may not explain why earlier developers made a change. Chronos is a way to let agents search past code changes and follow links to related ones, even when their descriptions use different words.
In tests, its full workflow solved a larger share of issue-resolution tasks than SWE-Agent on average across six tested models. The result is an average over those models, not a guarantee for every task.
The research
When an agent changes a software project, the current files may not explain why an older design choice exists or which constraint a previous fix preserved. Can repository history help the agent find related earlier changes when their descriptions emphasize different concerns from the task at hand?
Chronos links past code changes into searchable experience so coding agents can retrieve related history while proposing and selecting patches.
Chronos is a test-time framework that makes repository history searchable for code agents. It turns past pull requests into linked experience cards, so an agent can find related changes even when their descriptions focus on different concerns.
On 500 issue-resolution tasks, the full workflow raised the mean share solved from 69.2% to 72.9% across six tested backbones, compared with SWE-Agent. This shows higher average resolution in those paired evaluations; it does not establish an equal gain for every model or task.
These results cover the evaluated task sets and configurations. The human study judged whether cards could help with a task, not whether each card accurately reflected its original source; the authors also did not measure how results change with different graph-link weights.
Analysis
Deep
- Authors
- Xin Yin, Yiang Zhang, Zhiyuan Peng, Chao Ni, Zhe Cui
- License
- CC BY 4.0