# Agentic AI for Software: thoughts from Software Engineering community

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 5 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot's Code Contributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09293/) (2021)
- [SpecRover: Code Intent Extraction via LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02232/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [On the Impact of AGENTS.md Files on the Efficiency of AI Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20404/) (2026)
- [From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Practical Guide to Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18538/) (2025)
- [AI IDEs or Autonomous Agents? Measuring the Impact of Coding Agents on Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13597/) (2026)
- [Toward Agentic Software Engineering Beyond Code: Framing Vision, Values, and Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19692/) (2025)
- [HAFixAgent: History-Aware Program Repair Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01047/) (2025)
- [PenForge: On-the-Fly Expert Agent Construction for Automated Penetration Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06910/) (2026)
- [From Human Interfaces to Agent Interfaces: Rethinking Software Design in the Age of AI-Native Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20300/) (2026)
- [RAG-Reflect: Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Reflections for Comment-Driven Code Maintenance on Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22217/) (2026)
- [A-ProS: Towards Reliable Autonomous Programming Through Multi-Model Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18073/) (2026)
- [A Study of the Reliability of Agentic AI-Generated Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents have recently shown significant promise in software engineering. Much public attention has been transfixed on the topic of code generation from Large Language Models (LLMs) via a prompt. However, software engineering is much more than programming, and AI agents go far beyond instructions given by a prompt. At the code level, common software tasks include code generation, testing, and program repair. Design level software tasks may include architecture exploration, requirements understanding, and requirements enforcement at the code level. Each of these software tasks involves micro-decisions which can be taken autonomously by an AI agent, aided by program analysis tools. This creates the vision of an AI software engineer, where the AI agent can be seen as a member of a development team. Conceptually, the key to successfully developing trustworthy agentic AI-based software workflows will be to resolve the core difficulty in software engineering - the deciphering and clarification of developer intent. Specification inference, or deciphering the intent, thus lies at the heart of many software tasks, including software maintenance and program repair. A successful deployment of agentic technology into software engineering would involve making conceptual progress in such intent inference via agents. Trusting the AI agent becomes a key aspect, as software engineering becomes more automated. Higher automation also leads to higher volume of code being automatically generated, and then integrated into code-bases. Thus to deal with this explosion, an emerging direction is AI-based verification and validation (V & V) of AI generated code. We posit that agentic software workflows in future will include such AIbased V&V.