Software Engineering Agents

Overview

Software engineering agents use language models to work on tasks such as fixing repository issues, writing tests, building projects, reviewing code, and modernizing software. Common approaches combine planning and code retrieval with tools that run builds and tests; other systems use multiple specialized agents, repository memory, reinforcement learning, or formal verification. Performance is often evaluated on repository-level benchmarks such as SWE-bench, alongside terminal tasks and real-world settings that test build success, design constraints, and behavior over multiple steps. Agents can solve many tasks, but dependable performance remains difficult: passing tests may not mean a patch follows project intent, and greater autonomy or more agents can increase cost, regressions, and oversight demands.

Latest papers

CardsList

349 papers71 papers in the last four weeks, up 103% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?

    May 5, 2026John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Jeffrey Ma +9Software Engineering AgentsSoftware Engineering Benchmarks

  2. EngiAgent: Fully Connected Coordination of LLM Agents for Solving Open-ended Engineering Problems with Feasible Solutions

    May 4, 2026Xiyuan Zhou, Ruixi Zou, Xinlei Wang +4Multi-Agent LLM SystemsSoftware Engineering Agents

  3. Self-Evolving Software Agents

    Apr 29, 2026Marco Robol, Paolo GiorginiSoftware Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Self-Improvement

  4. RAT: RunAnyThing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration

    Apr 25, 2026Renhong Huang, Dongdong Hua, Yifei Sun +4Software Engineering AgentsAutomated Software Engineering

  5. Shift-Up: A Framework for Software Engineering Guardrails in AI-native Software Development -- Initial Findings

    Apr 22, 2026Petrus Lipsanen, Liisa Rannikko, François Christophe +3Software Engineering AgentsLLM Guardrails

  6. The Semi-Executable Stack: Agentic Software Engineering and the Expanding Scope of SE

    Apr 16, 2026Robert Feldt, Per Lenberg, Julian Frattini +1Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  7. Asking What Matters: Reward-Driven Clarification for Software Engineering Tasks

    Apr 16, 2026Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Vijay Viswanathan, Graham NeubigSoftware Engineering AgentsClarification Question Generation

  8. PrecisionCUA: Iterative Visual Refinement for Pixel-Precise Cursor Grounding in Code Editors

    Apr 14, 2026Himangi Mittal, Gaurav Mittal, Nelson Daniel Troncoso +1Visual GroundingGUI Automation

  9. From Plan to Action: How Well Do Agents Follow the Plan?

    Apr 13, 2026Shuyang Liu, Saman Dehghan, Jatin Ganhotra +2Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Planning

  10. AnyPoC: Universal Proof-of-Concept Test Generation for Scalable LLM-Based Bug Detection

    Apr 13, 2026Zijie Zhao, Chenyuan Yang, Weidong Wang +3Automated Software TestingSoftware Engineering Agents

  11. SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context

    Apr 13, 2026Shuquan Lian, Juncheng Liu, Yazhe Chen +2Software Engineering AgentsAgentic Reasoning

  12. FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

    Apr 13, 2026Haoran Ding, Zhaoguo Wang, Haibo ChenFormal VerificationSoftware Engineering Agents

  13. Problem Reductions at Scale: Agentic Integration of Computationally Hard Problems

    Apr 13, 2026Xi-Wei Pan, Shi-Wen An, Jin-Guo LiuAutomated Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  14. AgentForge: Execution-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Autonomous Software Engineering

    Apr 13, 2026Rajesh Kumar, Waqar Ali, Junaid Ahmed +2Software Engineering AgentsMulti-Agent Coding

  15. Guardrails Beat Guidance: A Large-Scale Study of Rules, Skills, and Persistent Configuration for Coding Agents

    Apr 13, 2026Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui +4Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Reliability

  16. AI Organizations are More Effective but Less Aligned than Individual Agents

    Apr 11, 2026Judy Hanwen Shen, Daniel Zhu, Siddarth Srinivasan +5Multi-Agent SystemsAI Alignment

  17. Credit-Budgeted ICPC-Style Coding: When Agents Must Pay for Every Decision

    Apr 11, 2026Lingfeng Zhou, Junhao Shi, Jin Gao +1Software Engineering AgentsAI Agent Benchmarks

  18. SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineering

    Apr 10, 2026Jingzhi Gong, Ruizhen Gu, Zhiwei Fei +7Software Engineering AgentsMulti-Objective Evolutionary Optimization

  19. ORACLE-SWE: Quantifying the Contribution of Critical Information Signals on SWE Agents

    Apr 9, 2026Kenan Li, Qirui Jin, Liao Zhu +13Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Evaluation

  20. Beyond Human-Readable: Rethinking Software Engineering Conventions for the Agentic Development Era

    Apr 8, 2026Dmytro UstynovSoftware Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Workflow Optimization

  21. ReCodeAgent: A Multi-agent Workflow for Language-Agnostic Translation and Validation of Large-Scale Repositories

    Apr 8, 2026Ali Reza Ibrahimzada, Brandon Paulsen, Daniel Kroening +1Code TranslationSoftware Engineering Agents

  22. Does Pass Rate Tell the Whole Story? Evaluating Design Constraint Compliance in LLM-based Issue Resolution

    Apr 7, 2026Kai Yu, Zhenhao Zhou, Junhao Zeng +8LLM Agent EvaluationSoftware Engineering Benchmarks