DistDebug-Bench: Can LLM Agents Diagnose Bugs in Distributed Systems?

LLM agents show strong potential in software engineering tasks such as competitive programming and code synthesis. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on small-scale settings such as self-contained Python modules, leaving distributed systems, an essential class of production software, under-examined. We introduce DistDebug-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating agents’ ability to diagnose complex-system failures at the code level. It curates 120 high-quality real-world bugs from 11 widely used distributed systems, spanning 5 programming languages and 10 failure patterns. Through an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents, we identify substantial gaps between current agents and real-world debugging tasks. A recurring gap is tunnel vision due to a lack of explicit reasoning structure and nondeterminism from inconsistent tool-use scope.