Imagine an AI that can fix software bugs without needing complex instructions or constant hand-holding. That’s the promise of Agentless, a new approach to automated software development that simplifies the process while delivering impressive results. Traditional AI agents for software development often resemble intricate webs of tools and decision-making processes. They're designed to mimic human developers, using tools, running tests, and iteratively refining their solutions. However, these complex systems can be costly, difficult to control, and prone to errors, stemming from the limitations of current AI models. Agentless tackles these challenges by streamlining the entire process. It employs a three-step approach: locate the problem, repair the faulty code, and validate the solution. By combining prompting-based and embedding-based retrieval methods, Agentless efficiently pinpoints the buggy parts of a program. Then, instead of generating entire code blocks, it proposes small, targeted edits, reducing the chance of introducing new errors. Finally, it employs both existing regression tests and generates its own reproduction tests to ensure the solution is correct. The results? Agentless not only rivals the performance of some of the top commercial solutions on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark, but it does so at a fraction of the cost. In a field often obsessed with leaderboard rankings, Agentless shines a light on the power of simplicity. Its approach demonstrates the potential for an AI tool to fix bugs efficiently without the need for complex tools or decision-making processes. What’s even more surprising is that Agentless is already being used by OpenAI to showcase the real-world capabilities of its newer language models. Beyond its immediate practical value, Agentless raises important questions about the future direction of AI in software engineering. While complex agents may still have their place, Agentless provides a compelling argument for a more streamlined approach. It may well be that in the quest to automate software development, less is more.