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We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-24 Florian Mudekereza

Despite coding agents' advances in handling increasingly complex tasks, their continued tendency to introduce unintended edits, subtle bugs, and scope drift that slip past code review means developers must still decide how much autonomy to…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Tanjal Shukla , K. J. Kevin Feng , Leijie Wang , Mohammad Rostami , Amy X. Zhang

Computer algorithms are written with the intent that when run they perform a useful function. Typically any information obtained is unknown until the algorithm is run. However, if the behavior of an algorithm can be fully described by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-22 Ian J Davis

Several recent advances in AI systems solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models (LMs) to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Eric Zelikman , Eliana Lorch , Lester Mackey , Adam Tauman Kalai

The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…

Formal specification is widely employed in the construction of high-quality software. However, there is often a huge gap between formal specification and actual implementation. While there is already a vast body of work on software testing…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2012-03-29 Zhiqiang Ren , Hongwei Xi

Developers now have access to a growing array of increasingly autonomous AI tools for software development. While many studies examine copilots that provide chat assistance or code completions, evaluations of coding agents -- which can…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Valerie Chen , Ameet Talwalkar , Robert Brennan , Graham Neubig

Multi-agent systems must decide which agent is the most appropriate for a given task. We propose a novel architecture for recommending which LLM agent out of many should perform a task given a natural language prompt by extending the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Joshua Park , Yongfeng Zhang

Coding agents are increasingly used as iterative development partners, but most benchmarks still evaluate one specification followed by one final assessment. This leaves out a basic question: can an agent keep its own codebase working as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Haiyang Shen , Xuanzhong Chen , Wendong Xu , Yun Ma , Liang Chen , Kuan Li

Patents play a critical role in driving technological innovation by granting inventors exclusive rights to their inventions. However the process of drafting a patent application is often expensive and time-consuming, making it a prime…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Ryan Shea , Zhou Yu

Code generation aims to produce code that fulfills requirements written in natural languages automatically. Large language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated promising effectiveness in this area. Nonetheless, these LLMs often fail…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Ruwei Pan , Hongyu Zhang , Chao Liu

AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually experience misalignment. We present an observational study of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ningzhi Tang , Chaoran Chen , Gelei Xu , Yiyu Shi , Yu Huang , Collin McMillan , Tao Dong , Toby Jia-Jun Li

Many conversational agents in the market today follow a standard bot development framework which requires training intent classifiers to recognize user input. The need to create a proper set of training examples is often the bottleneck in…

The capabilities of AI-assisted coding are progressing at breakneck speed. Chat-based vibe coding has evolved into fully fledged AI-assisted, agentic software development using agent scaffolds where the human developer creates a plan that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Magnus Palmblad , Jared M. Ragland , Benjamin A. Neely

We present AutoStan, a framework in which a command-line interface (CLI) coding agent autonomously builds and iteratively improves Bayesian models written in Stan. The agent operates in a loop, writing a Stan model file, executing MCMC…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Oliver Dürr

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Maksim Ivanov , Abhijay Rana , Gokul Prabhakaran

AI coding assistants have proliferated rapidly, yet structured pedagogical frameworks for learning these tools remain scarce. Developers face a gap between tool documentation and practical mastery, relying on fragmented resources such as…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Zain Naboulsi

AI coding agents can autonomously generate pull requests (PRs), yet little is known about how their contributions compare to those of humans. We analyze 33,596 agent-generated PRs (APRs) and 6,618 human PRs (HPRs) to compare code-change…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Dung Pham , Taher A. Ghaleb

The integration of AI agents as coding assistants into software development has raised questions about the long-term viability of AI agent-generated code. A prevailing hypothesis within the software engineering community suggests this code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Musfiqur Rahman , Emad Shihab

In this work, we describe a self-replication-based mechanism for designing agents of increasing complexity. We demonstrate the validity of this approach by solving simple, standard evolutionary computation problems in simulation. In the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-20 Thommen George Karimpanal