mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Declarative Language for Building And Orchestrating LLM-Powered Agent Workflows

arXiv 2512.19769 ↗First posted 22 Dec 2025cs.SE cs.AI cs.PLcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Building deployment-ready LLM agents requires complex orchestration of tools, data sources, and control flow logic, yet existing systems tightly couple agent logic to specific programming languages and deployment models. We present a declarative system that separates agent workflow specification from implementation, enabling the same pipeline definition to execute across multiple backend languages (Java, Python, Go) and deployment environments (cloud-native, on-premises). Our key insight is that most agent workflows consist of common patterns -- data serialization, filtering, RAG retrieval, API orchestration -- that can be expressed through a unified DSL rather than imperative code. This approach transforms agent development from application programming to configuration, where adding new tools or fine-tuning agent behaviors requires only pipeline specification changes, not code deployment. Our system natively supports A/B testing of agent strategies, allowing multiple pipeline variants to run on the same backend infrastructure with automatic metric collection and comparison. We evaluate our approach on real-world e-commerce workflows at PayPal, processing millions of daily interactions. Our results demonstrate 60% reduction in development time, and 3x improvement in deployment velocity compared to imperative implementations. The language's declarative approach enables non-engineers to modify agent behaviors safely, while maintaining sub-100ms orchestration overhead. We show that complex workflows involving product search, personalization, and cart management can be expressed in under 50 lines of DSL compared to 500+ lines of imperative code.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 0 of its 8 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2025.

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

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  3. 2026AgentSPEX: An Agent SPecification and EXecution Language
  4. 2026Do More Agents Help? Controlled and Protocol-Aligned Evaluation of LLM Agent Workflows
  5. 2026CURATE: Leveraging LLM Agents to Compose, Catalog, and Deploy Reproducible Workflows
  6. 2026Orchestral AI: A Framework for Agent Orchestration
  7. 2025Benchmarking and Studying the LLM-based Agent System in End-to-End Software Development
  8. 2026Orla: A Library for Serving LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems