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. Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

    Jun 10, 2026Akeela Darryl Fattha, Kia Ying Chua, Lingxiao Jiang +1Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  2. Structuring agentic AI for HPC code modernization

    Jun 7, 2026Anthony Marinov, Igor SfiligoiCode TranslationSoftware Engineering Agents

  3. Projecting the Emerging Mindset of SWE Agent by Launching a Wild Code Understanding Journey

    Jun 7, 2026Zhengyi Zhuo, Yan LiuSoftware EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  4. Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills

    Jun 5, 2026Chuan Xiao, Zhengbo Jiao, Shaobo Wang +5Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Skill Learning

  5. Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

    Jun 4, 2026Wenbo Pan, Shujie Liu, Chin-Yew Lin +5Software Engineering AgentsAgent Harness Optimization

  6. Enhancing Software Engineering Through Closed-Loop Memory Optimization

    Jun 4, 2026Xuehang Guo, Xingyao Wang, Zora Zhiruo Wang +3Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Evaluation

  7. Agentic Software: How AI Agents Are Restructuring the Software Paradigm

    Jun 4, 2026Zhenfeng CaoSoftware Engineering AgentsAutomated Software Engineering

  8. Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory

    Jun 2, 2026Ruida Wang, Jerry Huang, Pengcheng Wang +3Software Engineering AgentsFormal Verification

  9. Bridging Requirements and Architecture: Multi-Agent Orchestration with External Knowledge and Hierarchical Memory

    May 31, 2026Ruiyin Li, Yiran Zhang, Xiyu Zhou +6Software EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  10. When Parallelism Pays Off: Cohesion-Aware Task Partitioning for Multi-Agent Coding

    May 31, 2026Xu Yang, Lunyiu Nie, Ethan Chandra +3Graph PartitioningMulti-Agent System Optimization

  11. SpecBench: Evaluating Specification-Level Reasoning for Software Engineering LLM Agents

    May 28, 2026Grant Hamblin, Kevin Song, Zhanda Zhu +4Requirements EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

  12. Long Live the Librarian! A Persistent Search Sub-Agent for Energy-Efficient Multi-Agent Software Engineering Systems

    May 27, 2026Seunghyuk Cho, Sunghyun Choi, Jaeseung Heo +4Multi-Agent System OptimizationSoftware Engineering Agents

  13. Benchmarks are Not Enough: RAMP for Runtime Assessing of Agentic Models in Production Systems

    May 26, 2026Yipeng Ouyang, Xin Huang, Bingjie Liu +3Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Evaluation

  14. SetupX: Can LLM Agents Learn from Past Failures in Functionality-Correct Code Repository Setup?

    May 25, 2026Zihang Zhou, Ziqian Ren, Yukai Wu +7Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Self-Improvement

  15. Code2UML: Agentic LLMs with context engineering for scalable software visualization

    May 23, 2026Alin-Gabriel Văduva, Anca-Ioana Andreescu, Simona-Vasilica Oprea +1Software Engineering AgentsLLM Prompting

  16. Understanding Conversational Patterns in Multi-agent Programming: A Case Study on Fibonacci Game Development

    May 22, 2026Srijita Basu, Viktor Kjellberg, Simin Sun +5Multi-Agent CoordinationSoftware Engineering Agents

  17. The Time is Here for Just-in-Time Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

    May 22, 2026Shu Liu, Alexander Krentsel, Shubham Agarwal +8Software Engineering AgentsLLM-Based Program Synthesis

  18. MOSS: Self-Evolution through Source-Level Rewriting in Autonomous Agent Systems

    May 21, 2026Qianshu Cai, Yonggang Zhang, Xianzhang Jia +5Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Self-Improvement

  19. From Patches to Trajectories: Privileged Process Supervision for Software-Engineering Agents

    May 21, 2026Murong Ma, Tianyu Chen, Yun Lin +7Supervised Fine-TuningSoftware Engineering Agents

  20. Reversa: A Reverse Documentation Engineering Framework for Converting Legacy Software into Operational Specifications for AI Agents

    May 18, 2026Sanderson Oliveira de Macedo, Ronaldo Martins da CostaSoftware EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents