English

Can Coding Agents Be General Agents?

Software Engineering 2026-04-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

As coding agents have seen rapid capability and adoption gains, users are applying them to general tasks beyond software engineering. In this post, we investigate whether coding agents can successfully generalize to end-to-end business process automation. We identify gaps in current evaluations, and conduct a case study to evaluate a coding agent on practical business tasks in an open-core Enterprise Resource Planning system. We find that the agent reliably completes simple tasks but exhibits characteristic failures on complex tasks, suggesting that bridging domain logic and code execution is a key bottleneck to generalizability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.13107,
  title  = {Can Coding Agents Be General Agents?},
  author = {Maksim Ivanov and Abhijay Rana and Gokul Prabhakaran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13107},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:09:27.948Z