The paper titled "Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025" examines how experienced developers employ AI agents in software development. Through field observations and surveys, it finds that developers value agents for productivity but maintain control over design and implementation to ensure quality. They use agents as collaborative tools rather than full delegation, selecting tasks based on suitability and leveraging their expertise to guide agent behavior.
arXiv:2607. 21832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models and their rapid adoption across software engineering tasks have made Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents an integral component of modern software development workflows.
arXiv:2606. 21894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers?
arXiv:2607. 14037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development.
arXiv:2608. 04148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI is increasingly used to coordinate planning, implementation, review, and testing in software development, yet it often offers limited transparency into its decisions and interactions.
arXiv:2607. 10856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rise of Software Engineering (SE) agents, i.
arXiv:2606.21804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding age...
Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development. While prior studies have examined PR-level outcomes of agent-generated contributions, less is known about how agentic coding tools are adopted and managed at the project level.
arXiv:2608. 12355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in AI coding agent research has led to rapid improvements in agents' ability to autonomously perform complex software engineering tasks, from editing large codebases to executing long-horizon development workflows.
Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is a practice where developers and AI coding agents write specifications to guide software implementation, aiming to preserve the intent behind natural‑language instructions. This study analyzes SDD through Reddit discussions, interviews with 21 practitioners (including eight tool makers), and a large corpus of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 GitHub repositories. Findings reveal that while specs often include implementation details that aid agents, they also risk decay; tool-specific structures influence perception, and benefits vary between individuals and teams, with SDD mainly used for new features and involving higher planning and review costs.
The paper introduces LibraryDesignBench, a benchmark that tests how well agents can design reusable libraries from specifications without prescribed designs. It evaluates libraries by measuring the correctness and simplicity of programs written by three different user agents across 242 programming problems in four languages. Findings show that while agents often replicate human-designed abstractions, downstream agents still tend to reimplement library features due to rigidity or usability issues, and that providing more prescriptive guidance improves reuse and program simplicity.
arXiv:2605.29442v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectori...
The article reports a case study of a production healthcare platform that was built using software‑engineering agents and overseen by an operator lacking formal software training. Over time the system evolved into a meta‑agent workflow where one agent wrote code, other agents supervised and reviewed it, and project rules carried lessons forward. The study found that tests, monitors, and reviewing agents were fallible—some measured proxies instead of outcomes, audits failed silently, checks disappeared from reports, and an automated repair caused operational disruption—highlighting that human control relied on aligning the intended outcome, the evidence used to judge it, the agents’ permissions, and the final human decision around the same objective.