BootstrapAgent: Distilling Repository Setup into Reusable Agent Knowledge

TL;DR

BootstrapAgent is a multi-agent framework that distills repository bootstrap heuristics into a reusable, verifiable contract, improving setup success rates and efficiency for code agents working with unfamiliar repositories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to repository bootstrapping by creating a persistent, verifiable contract that encapsulates setup knowledge, enabling reuse and improved performance.

Findings

Achieves 92.9% success rate on benchmarks, outperforming baselines by over 10%.

Reduces downstream agent token usage by 25.9%.

Decreases build time by 22.3%.

Abstract

Code agents increasingly help developers work with unfamiliar repositories, but every such task depends on a costly prerequisite: bootstrapping the repository into a usable development state. This process requires substantial trial-and-error exploration, yet the resulting knowledge--resolved dependencies, repair strategies--stays trapped in a single conversation, unavailable to future agents. We therefore formulate repository bootstrapping as a reusable startup knowledge problem and introduce BootstrapAgent, a multi-agent framework that distills the heuristics discovered during bootstrap exploration into a persistent, verifiable, agent-consumable .bootstrap contract. Through evidence extraction, structured planning, deterministic Docker-based verification, and trace-driven repair, BootstrapAgent generates a contract covering environment setup, diagnostic checks, minimal verification, and accumulated repair knowledge. We further propose warm repair with clean replay to accelerate iterative debugging without sacrificing cold-start reproducibility, and a delta repair with sanity check to prevent reward hacking. Experiments on three benchmarks show that BootstrapAgent achieves a 92.9% success rate, outperforming the baseline by over 10% while reducing downstream agent token usage by 25.9% and build time by 22.3%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Vossera/BootstrapAgent.