# Prometheus: Towards Long-Horizon Codebase Navigation for Repository-Level Problem Solving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Understanding Code Agent Behaviour: An Empirical Study of Success and Failure Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00197/) (2025)
- [ContextBench: A Benchmark for Context Retrieval in Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05892/) (2026)
- [Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03515/) (2026)
- [Failure as a Process: An Anatomy of CLI Coding Agent Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09510/) (2026)
- [DRAINCODE: Stealthy Energy Consumption Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation via Context Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20615/) (2026)
- [The Devil Is in the Interface: Evaluating How Tool Architecture Shapes Coding Agent Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11386/) (2026)
- [Engineering Reliable Coding Agents: Evaluating and Operating the System Around the Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13867/) (2026)
- [VulnResolver: A Hybrid Agent Framework for LLM-Based Automated Vulnerability Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13933/) (2026)
- [Reusing Past Repairs Through Hierarchical Trajectory Abstraction for Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29658/) (2026)
- [Context-Augmented Code Generation Using Programming Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20810/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Repository Exploration: Dual-Modal Structural Reasoning for Agentic Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01929/) (2026)
- [RepoAtlas: Guiding Coding Agents via Evolving Multimodal Repository Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16936/) (2026)
- [SWEPatchTest: Evaluating Software Tests Beyond Reproduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18004/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in automating software engineering tasks, spurring the emergence of coding agents that scaffold LLMs with external tools to resolve repository-level problems. However, existing agents still struggle to navigate large-scale codebases, as the Needle-in-a-Haystack problem persists even with million-token context windows, where relevant evidence is often overwhelmed by large volumes of irrelevant code and documentation. Prior codebase navigation approaches, including embedding-based retrieval, file-system exploration, and graph-based retrieval, address parts of this challenge but fail to capture the temporal continuity of agent reasoning, rendering agents stateless and causing repeated repository traversals that hinder scalable planning and reasoning. To address these limitations, we present Prometheus, a memory-centric coding agent framework for long-horizon codebase navigation. Prometheus represents the repository as a unified knowledge graph to encode semantic dependencies and employs a context engine augmented with working memory that retains and reuses previously explored contexts to ensure continuity across reasoning steps. Built upon this engine, Prometheus integrates memory-enhanced navigation into a multi-agent system for automated issue resolution, encompassing issue classification, bug reproduction, patch generation, and verification. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two widely used issue resolution benchmarks, i.e., SWE-bench Verified and SWE-PolyBench Verified. Powered by GPT-5, Prometheus achieves state-of-the-art performance with 74.4% and 33.8% resolution rates on the two benchmarks, ranking Top-6 and Top-1 among open-source agent systems, respectively. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/EuniAI/Prometheus.