arXiv AI
The paper examines how AI coding agents are evolving beyond simple autocomplete to perform complex tasks such as repository inspection, multi-file editing, tool execution, test writing, pull request creation, and long-duration work with minimal supervision. It highlights that while these agents boost coding activity, significant bottlenecks remain in review, integration, testing, security, deployment, and production operations, and that the economics of software development are shifting toward variable token, tool, sandbox, CI, and rework costs. The authors synthesize recent research and industry data to propose four engineering concepts—Agentic SDLC Throughput Paradox, Production-Qualified Change, Verification Tax, and an Agentic SDLC Control Plane—to guide the allocation of autonomy within cost, reliability, and human-attention constraints, ultimately reframing the research focus to production-qualified value per dollar, reviewer-hour, and operational risk.
AgentSWE is a new benchmark for agent software engineering that evaluates coding agents across three lifecycle stages: creating an agent from a natural‑language requirement, editing existing agent codebases, and optimizing toward a measurable target. The benchmark consists of 25 commission‑style tasks, where builders iterate on a few illustrative cases and are then tested on held‑out cases that cover the full requirement, with hard pass/fail gates or objective‑based grading. Experiments show that current coding agents fail to meet the requirements, revealing common failure modes such as overfitting, incomplete runtimes, and unsupported completion claims.
By Jiahao Wang, Hongjin Qian, Yuyang Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Zheng Liu
arXiv:2608. 06640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The widespread integration of AI coding assistants offers undeniable boosts to engineering velocity.
By Michael Tran, Fred Lewis, Kun Yang, Saksham Thakur, Aditya Kini, Aditya Patil, Milad Hashemi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
arXiv:2607. 01087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI is shifting software engineering from a practice organized around scarce implementation effort toward one organized around abundant, low-cost code production.
By James C. Davis, Paschal C. Amusuo, Tanmay Singla, Berk \c{C}akar, Kirsten A. Davis
The paper introduces Spec-Driven Agentic Development (SDAD), a framework that leverages large language models to ingest extensive functional requirement documents and repository context in a single workflow, turning specification quality into the engine for autonomous software delivery. SDAD blends disciplined upfront formalisation with rapid implementation, encompassing intent capture, machine‑readable specifications, agentic synthesis, and multi‑agent verification with human sign‑off. It positions AI‑code as a fourth production paradigm, compares it to traditional Waterfall and Agile approaches, and extends the model to team role evolution, quantitative governance metrics, and a staged migration blueprint for practical adoption.
By Vu Hung Nguyen, Thanh Nguyen
arXiv:2606. 03907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI coding tools write code with increasing autonomy and in doing so decide when to import a library and when to implement functionality from scratch.
By Jai Lal Lulla, Matthias Galster, Jie M. Zhang, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude
arXiv:2604. 01527v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Production deployment of AI coding agents requires fast, reproducible evaluation signals.
By Smriti Jha, Matteo Paltenghi, Chandra Maddila, Vijayaraghavan Murali, Shubham Ugare, Satish Chandra
arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.
By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv:2610.22732v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Advances in frontier coding agents have sharply increased the token costs of AI-assisted software engineering. Their token efficiency is typically eval...
By Aaron J. Li, Weijia Xu, Chandan Singh, Zixiao Chen, Jeevana Priya Inala, Charlotte Siska, Acar Tamersoy, Bin Yu, Ion Stoica, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.
By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou
arXiv:2608. 05179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used across the scientific research lifecycle: ideation, literature search, experiment design and execution, analysis, manuscript drafting, and review.
By Tianyu Ding, Aditya Nannapaneni, Bingfan Liu, Ling Zhang
arXiv:2609.38269v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Coding agents are increasingly asked to build software rather than patch it, yet benchmarks for from-scratch repository construction are mostly limit...
By Pei Yang, Tianyu Shi, Yuhang Yao, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang, Dun Pei, Haonan Wang, Pengbin Feng, Guanxu Yu, Jingchun Huang, Zeyu Zhang, Shuhan Sun, Hao Li, Xiang Li, Jie Xiao, Xinyu Wang, Hanxin Chen, Daqi Li, Qi Jia, Hongshan Lin, Zhizhou Gu, Zijun Tian, Weizhi Du, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang
arXiv:2606. 30573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SWE-Interact, a new testbed for evaluating coding agents on multi-turn, interactive, user-driven software engineering tasks.
By Mohit Raghavendra, Anisha Gunjal, Aakash Sabharwal, Yunzhong He