Identifying bug-inducing commits (BICs) is important for studying software bugs and maintaining software, yet the accuracy of existing SZZ methods remains limited. Although various improvements have been proposed, many SZZ methods still rely on code tracing, which searches for BICs by tracing code changed in a bug-fixing commit (BFC) back to earlier commits. However, this approach may miss the actual BIC when the code responsible for introducing a bug differs from the code modified to fix it. To overcome this limitation, we investigate whether BIC identification can be improved by exploring search strategies that are not constrained to start with code tracing. We use Claude Code, a coding agent that has demonstrated high BIC identification accuracy in prior research, to explore such strategies. Rather than prescribing a search process or providing predefined candidate commits, we allow Claude Code to independently investigate a Git repository. We evaluate its identification accuracy and search behavior on 79 Java cases from 70 repositories. In 79.7% of runs, Claude Code reviewed commit histories before inspecting individual code diffs. It used commit messages to select changes for closer inspection. With this approach, Claude Code achieves an F1 score of 0.771, significantly outperforming all ten evaluated SZZ baselines. Our failure analysis also reveals incorrect oracle labels and ambiguities in BIC definitions in the studied evaluation dataset. After reconstructing the evaluation dataset to address these issues, Claude Code achieves an F1 score of 0.938. A key lesson from Claude Code for improving SZZ search strategies is to use semantic information to find relevant commits and then examine their code changes, rather than starting with code tracing.

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