Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Real-world software engineering tasks require coding agents that can operate on massive repositories, sustain long-horizon sessions, and reliably coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing research-grade coding agents offer transparency but struggle when scaled to heavier, production-level workloads, while production-grade systems achieve strong practical performance but provide limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We introduce the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), a software engineering agent that can operate at large-scale codebases. CCA is built on top of the Confucius SDK, an agent development platform structured around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK supports a unified orchestrator with advanced context management for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension system for reliable tool use. In addition, we introduce a meta-agent that automates the construction, evaluation, and refinement of agents through a build-test-improve cycle, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks and tool stacks. Instantiated on the Confucius SDK using the meta-agent, CCA demonstrates strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a Resolve@1 of 59%, exceeding prior research baselines as well as commercial results, under identical repositories, model backends, and tool access.
Key facts. Cited by 11 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 24 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2025.
Builds on
24 of 37 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Live-SWE-agent: Can Software Engineering Agents Self-Evolve on the Fly?17 Nov
- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents30 Apr
- 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym30 Dec
- 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
- 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents1 Jul
- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May
Other references · 18
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
- 2022Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCodecited by 1,462
- 2022DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code Generationcited by 452
- 2024CRUXEval: A Benchmark for Code Reasoning, Understanding and Executioncited by 300
- 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 279
- 2025SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolutioncited by 263
- 2024Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoningcited by 247
- 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 203
- 2025Agent Lightning: Train ANY AI Agents with Reinforcement Learningcited by 109
6 more
- 2025LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming?cited by 55
- 2025Steering LLM Thinking with Budget Guidancecited by 33
- 2025BudgetThinker: Empowering Budget-aware LLM Reasoning with Control Tokenscited by 29
- 2025Is Vibe Coding Safe? Benchmarking Vulnerability of Agent-Generated Code in Real-World Taskscited by 22
- 2025SWE-fficiency: Can Language Models Optimize Real-World Repositories on Real Workloads?cited by 21
- 2025Satori-SWE: Evolutionary Test-Time Scaling for Sample-Efficient Software Engineeringcited by 17
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026SWE-Master: Unleashing the Potential of Software Engineering Agents via Post-Trainingcited by 22
- 2026SWE-Next: Scalable Real-World Software Engineering Tasks for Agentscited by 9
- 2026An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agentscited by 6
- 2026Codified Context: Infrastructure for AI Agents in a Complex Codebasecited by 5
- 2026Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Qualitycited by 5
- 2026Self-Evolving Coding Agentscited by 2
- 2026Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?cited by 1
- 2026When Does Restricting a Coding Agent to executecode Help? A Regime × Agent-Design Ablationcited by 1
- 2026Coupling Planning with Episodic Memory in LLM Agents for Software Issue Resolutioncited by 1
- 2026The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite: Architectural Convergence in Three LLM Agent Harnessescited by 0
- 2026What Do CAE Simulation Agents Really Need Beyond a Generic Harness?cited by 0
- 2026An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents17 Sep 2026
- 2026What Do CAE Simulation Agents Really Need Beyond a Generic Harness?3 Sep 2026
- 2026The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite: Architectural Convergence in Three LLM Agent Harnesses25 Aug 2026
- 2026Coupling Planning with Episodic Memory in LLM Agents for Software Issue Resolution7 Aug 2026
- 2026Self-Evolving Coding Agents4 Aug 2026
- 2026When Does Restricting a Coding Agent to executecode Help? A Regime × Agent-Design Ablation12 Jul 2026
- 2026Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality4 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?26 Mar 2026
- 2026SWE-Next: Scalable Real-World Software Engineering Tasks for Agents21 Mar 2026
- 2026Codified Context: Infrastructure for AI Agents in a Complex Codebase24 Feb 2026
- 2026SWE-Master: Unleashing the Potential of Software Engineering Agents via Post-Training3 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?
- 2025A Comprehensive Empirical Evaluation of Agent Frameworks on Code-centric Software Engineering Tasks
- 2025Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Coding Agents
- 2026Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures
- 2026Understanding the Architecture of Coding Agents: An Exploratory Study Using a Research Prototype
- 2026Code as Agent Harness
- 2024Self-Organized Agents: A LLM Multi-Agent Framework toward Ultra Large-Scale Code Generation and Optimization
- 2025GitTaskBench: A Benchmark for Code Agents Solving Real-World Tasks Through Code Repository Leveraging