arXiv AI

Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!

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 AI
Aug 20

Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025

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.

By Ruanqianqian Huang, Avery Reyna, Sorin Lerner, Haijun Xia, Brian Hempel
Simon Willison
Sep 24

Note on 24th September 2026

Simon Willison reflects on his experience with coding agents, noting that while they enable impressive feats, they also complicate software engineering. He emphasizes that fully harnessing their capabilities demands exceptional discipline and deep knowledge. The article highlights the dual nature of coding agents as both powerful tools and challenging additions to development workflows.

arXiv AI
Jun 17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

arXiv:2606. 17819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills -- structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities -- have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill.

By Maksim Shaposhnikov, Nicolas Fortuin, Simon Stipcich, Maria I. Gorinova, Amy Heineike, Rob Willoughby
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Humans are Missing from AI Coding Agent Research

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.

By Zora Z. Wang, John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Alexa Tartaglini, Valerie Chen, Yuxiang Wei, Zijian Wang, Lingming Zhang, Karthik Narasimhan, Ludwig Schmidt, Graham Neubig, Daniel Fried, Diyi Yang