How Should Agents See Code? Rethinking Code Representations for Agentic Software Engineering

Melika Sepidband, Jiho Shin, Song Wang, Hadi Hemmati

LLM agents are increasingly used for repository-level software engineering tasks. However, most agents still access repositories through raw files, lexical search, and shell commands, treating code primarily as text. This paper investigates map-based code-representation workflows as a design variable in agentic software engineering, examining how different repository views change agents' retrieval behavior, task success, token use, and latency. In this paper, we study five code-representation workflows: abstract syntax trees, call graphs, module dependencies, documentation-enriched search, and a hybrid workflow that combines them. Each workflow exposes a repository map that the agent can query during a task. We evaluate Claude Code with Haiku 4.5 against a raw-tool baseline on four repository-level tasks: fault localization with LinuxFLBench, repository-level code generation and repair with SWE-bench Pro, test generation with SWT-bench, and security patching with SecBench. The results show that representation workflows are most useful as token-saving tools when localization is the bottleneck, while their success gains narrow when the decisive step is patch or test authoring. On…