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. Nidus: Externalized Reasoning for AI-Assisted Engineering

    Apr 6, 2026Danil GorinevskiAI Agent GovernanceRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  2. GBQA: A Game Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs as Quality Assurance Engineers

    Apr 3, 2026Shufan Jiang, Chios Chen, Zhiyang ChenAutomated Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  3. From SWE-ZERO to SWE-HERO: Execution-free to Execution-based Fine-tuning for Software Engineering Agents

    Apr 2, 2026Nikolai Ludwig, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Somshubra Majumdar +1Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Training

  4. Reproducible, Explainable, and Effective Evaluations of Agentic AI for Software Engineering

    Apr 1, 2026Jingyue Li, André StorhaugAI Agent EvaluationAgent Evaluation

  5. Spec-Harness: Assessing and Guiding LLM-Synthesized Formal Specifications Beyond Verifiability

    Mar 31, 2026Md Rakib Hossain Misu, Cristina V. Lopes, Iris Ma +2Software Engineering AgentsLLM-Based Program Synthesis

  6. EffiSkill: Agent Skill Based Automated Code Efficiency Optimization

    Mar 29, 2026Zimu Wang, Yuling Shi, Mengfan Li +4Code OptimizationLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

  7. Code Review Agent Benchmark

    Mar 24, 2026Yuntong Zhang, Zhiyuan Pan, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf +3Automated Code ReviewSoftware Engineering Benchmarks

  8. Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents

    Mar 23, 2026Jiayi Geng, Graham NeubigMulti-Agent CoordinationSoftware Engineering Agents

  9. LLM-based Automated Architecture View Generation: Where Are We Now?

    Mar 22, 2026Miryala Sathvika, Rudra Dhar, Karthik VaidhyanathanSoftware EngineeringAutomated Software Engineering

  10. SWE-Next: Scalable Real-World Software Engineering Tasks for Agents

    Mar 21, 2026Jiarong Liang, Zhiheng Lyu, Zijie Liu +4Automated Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  11. REVERE: Reflective Evolving Research Engineer

    Mar 21, 2026Balaji Dinesh Gangireddi, Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan +1LLM Agent Self-ImprovementPrompt Optimization

  12. SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?

    Mar 16, 2026Tingxu Han, Yi Zhang, Wei Song +4Software Engineering AgentsSoftware Engineering Benchmarks

  13. Beyond Local Code Optimization: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Software System Optimization

    Mar 16, 2026Huiyun Peng, Parth Vinod Patil, Antonio Zhong Qiu +2Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  14. Beyond Verifiable Rewards: Rubric-Based GRM for Reinforced Fine-Tuning SWE Agents

    Mar 13, 2026Jiawei Huang, Qingping Yang, Renjie Zheng +1Software Engineering AgentsReward Design for RL

  15. SWE-Fuse: Empowering Software Agents via Issue-free Trajectory Learning and Entropy-aware RLVR Training

    Mar 9, 2026Xin-Cheng Wen, Binbin Chen, Haoxuan Lan +3Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Training

  16. CodeScout: Contextual Problem Statement Enhancement for Software Agents

    Mar 5, 2026Manan Suri, Xiangci Li, Mehdi Shojaie +5Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Workflow Optimization

  17. A Dual-Helix Governance Approach Towards Reliable Agentic Artificial Intelligence for WebGIS Development

    Mar 4, 2026Boyuan Guan, Wencong Cui, Levente JuhaszSoftware Engineering AgentsAI Coding Agents

  18. Beyond the 'Diff': Addressing Agentic Entropy in Agentic Software Development

    Mar 3, 2026Matteo Casserini, Alessandro Facchini, Andrea FerrarioAI Agent MonitoringSoftware Engineering Agents

  19. TopoEdge: Topology-Grounded Agentic Framework for Edge Networking Code Generation and Repair

    Feb 28, 2026Haomin Qi, Bohan Liu, Zihan Dai +1Software Engineering Agents

  20. SWE-rebench V2: Language-Agnostic SWE Task Collection at Scale

    Feb 27, 2026Ibragim Badertdinov, Maksim Nekrashevich, Anton Shevtsov +1Software Engineering BenchmarksSoftware Engineering Agents