# EET: Experience-Driven Early Termination for Cost-Efficient Software Engineering Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05777/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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.
- Builds on 11 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02977/) (2024)
- [Trae Agent: An LLM-based Agent for Software Engineering with Test-time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23370/) (2025)
- [How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09598/) (2025)
- [Agentic Plan Caching: Test-Time Memory for Fast and Cost-Efficient LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14852/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation: A Survey with Focus on Repository-Level Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04905/) (2025)
- [BudgetMLAgent: A Cost-Effective LLM Multi-Agent system for Automating Machine Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07464/) (2024)
- [CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03254/) (2025)
- [More with Less: An Empirical Study of Turn-Control Strategies for Efficient Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16786/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [On the Impact of AGENTS.md Files on the Efficiency of AI Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20404/) (2026)
- [SWE-Doctor: Guiding Software Engineering Agents with Runtime Diagnosis from Multi-Faceted Bug Reproduction Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00990/) (2026)
- [Fail-Fast, Restart-Smart: Early Failure Prediction and Restart for SWE Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03222/) (2026)
- [SkillForge: Self-Distilling Agents for Project-Specific Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18933/) (2026)
- [The Best Programming Language for Tokenmaxxing: An Investigation of Coding Agent Behavior Across Programming Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22807/) (2026)
- [What Can Component-Replacement Evidence Establish? A Critical Scoping Review of Local Decisions in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39989/) (2026)
- [Agency as a New Organizing Abstraction for Computer Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17410/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Software engineering (SE) agents powered by large language models are increasingly adopted in practice, yet they often incur substantial monetary cost. We introduce EET, an experience-driven early termination approach that reduces the cost of SE agents while preserving task performance. EET extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection, reducing unproductive iterations. We evaluate EET on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark across three representative SE agents. EET consistently reduces total cost by 19%-55% (32% on average), with negligible loss in resolution rate (at most 0.2%). These efficiency gains are achieved, on average, by identifying early-termination opportunities for 11% of issues and reducing API calls, input tokens, and output tokens by 21%, 30%, and 25%, respectively. We release the code, prompts, and data at https://github.com/IanWalls/EET.