# Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 135 of its 191 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 135)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11868/) (2026)
- [Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01030/) (2024)
- [Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21139/) (2024)
- [Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28052/) (2026)
- [SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16941/) (2025)
- [Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16416/) (2025)
- [TALM: Tool Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12255/) (2022)
- [Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11967/) (2025)
- [Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25850/) (2026)
- [Where LLM Agents Fail and How They can Learn From Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25370/) (2025)
- [Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16153/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00083/) (2025)
- [AIOS: LLM Agent Operating System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16971/) (2024)
- [Live-SWE-agent: Can Software Engineering Agents Self-Evolve on the Fly?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13646/) (2025)
- [SWE-PolyBench: A multi-language benchmark for repository level evaluation of coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08703/) (2025)
- [SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15401/) (2026)
- [LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11942/) (2025)
- [AutoHarness: improving LLM agents by automatically synthesizing a code harness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03329/) (2026)
- [Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08224/) (2026)
- [NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12730/) (2025)
- [Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06132/) (2026)
- [HyperAgent: Generalist Software Engineering Agents to Solve Coding Tasks at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16299/) (2024)
- [SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18470/) (2025)
- [Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16443/) (2026)
- [ITBench: Evaluating AI Agents across Diverse Real-World IT Automation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05352/) (2025)
- [The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03690/) (2025)
- [On Data Engineering for Scaling LLM Terminal Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21193/) (2026)
- [Kimi-Dev: Agentless Training as Skill Prior for SWE-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23045/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Self-Supervised Scaling of Terminal Environments for Scientific Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02710/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model agents increasingly act through terminals, yet existing surveys disperse terminal-mediated behavior across software engineering, tool use, and computer-use research. We regard terminal agents as systems whose dominant progress-bearing action--observation loop is mediated by terminal command execution, textual feedback, and stateful environment interaction. Using terminal-mediated execution as an organizing lens, this survey establishes workload-level boundaries and connects system architecture, competence acquisition, and evaluation through a seven-dimensional terminal competence profile. Our synthesis shows that realized behavior is jointly shaped by the model, interface, harness, runtime, and environment. Executable trajectories ground learning in action consequences, verification, and recovery, whereas prevailing evaluations emphasize final outcomes and expose process quality, recovery, and governance unevenly. Bounded fixed-condition diagnostics illustrate two implications: benchmark families expose different process signals, and matched system comparisons reveal benchmark-dependent performance and limits of component attribution. These findings motivate explicit reporting of system and runtime conditions, supported by replayable traces and process-level evidence. The framework provides a unified basis for studying terminal-mediated agency across software engineering and emerging application domains.