Full environment snapshots enable coding agents to recover from failures more efficiently by preserving runtime state (databases, services) that can't be reconstructed from code diffs alone, especially for complex multi-service tasks.
This paper shows that coding agents can solve tasks more efficiently by saving and restoring full environment snapshots during development, rather than always restarting from scratch. The key insight is that progress outside the code repository—like running databases and services—matters most for recovery, making snapshot-based search particularly valuable for multi-service coding tasks.