Papers › Bug In the Code Stack: Can LLMs Find Bugs in Large Python Code Stacks
Bug In the Code Stack: Can LLMs Find Bugs in Large Python Code Stacks
Hokyung Lee, Sumanyu Sharma, Bing Hu
Recent research in Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) benchmarks has explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in retrieving contextual information from large text documents. However, as LLMs become increasingly integrated into software development processes, it is crucial to evaluate their performance in code-based environments. As LLMs are further developed for program synthesis, we need to ensure that LLMs can understand syntax and write syntactically correct code. As a step in ensuring LLMs understand syntax, LLMs can be evaluated in their ability to find and detect syntax bugs. Our benchmark, Bug In The Code Stack (BICS), is designed to assess the ability of LLMs to identify simple syntax bugs within large source code. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) code-based environments pose significantly more challenge compared to text-based environments for retrieval tasks, (2) there is a substantial performance disparity among different models, and (3) there is a notable correlation between longer context lengths and performance degradation, though the extent of this degradation varies between models.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections