EMemeryberger·May 5, 2025
You should check out ChatDBG project - which AFAICT goes much further than this work, though in a different direction, and which, among other things, lets the LLM drive the debugging process - has been out since early 2023. We initially did a WinDBG integration but have since focused on lldb/gdb and pdb (the Python debugger), especially for Python notebooks. In particular, for native code, it integrates a language server to let the LLM easily find declarations and references to variables, for example. We spent considerable time developing an API that enabled the LLM to make the best use of the debugger’s capabilities. (It also is not limited to post mortem debugging). ChatDBG’s been out since 2023, though it has of course evolved since that time. Code is here [1] with some videos; it’s been downloaded north of 80K times to date. Our techn
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ical paper [2] will be presented at FSE (top software engineering conference) in June. Our evaluation shows that ChatDBG is on its own able to resolve many issues, and that with some slight nudging from humans, it is even more effective.
[1] https://github.com/plasma-umass/ChatDBG (north of 75K downloads to date)
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16354