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.
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Ma, D., Wang, S., Huang, X., Wang, Z., Wang, Y., Si, L., Wei, X., & Zhang, W. (2026). Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel? https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel
MLA 9
Ma, Dongsheng, et al. "Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?" https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel.
Chicago (author–date)
Ma, Dongsheng, Sizhe Wang, Xinyi Huang, Zhengren Wang, Yuhan Wang, Luyang Si, Xincheng Wei, and Wentao Zhang. 2026. "Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?" https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel.
Harvard
Ma, D., Wang, S., Huang, X., Wang, Z., Wang, Y., Si, L., Wei, X. and Zhang, W. (2026) 'Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel.
Vancouver
Ma D, Wang S, Huang X, Wang Z, Wang Y, Si L, et al. Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel? https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel
IEEE
D. Ma, S. Wang, X. Huang, Z. Wang, Y. Wang, L. Si, X. Wei, and W. Zhang, "Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/do-coding-agents-reuse-existing-code-or-reinvent-the-wheel.