Unified Software Engineering Agent as AI Software Engineer

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Applis, Leonhard, Zhang, Yuntong, Liang, Shanchao, Jiang, Nan, Tan, Lin, Roychoudhury, Abhik
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Applis, Leonhard
Zhang, Yuntong
Liang, Shanchao
Jiang, Nan
Tan, Lin
Roychoudhury, Abhik
author_facet Applis, Leonhard
Zhang, Yuntong
Liang, Shanchao
Jiang, Nan
Tan, Lin
Roychoudhury, Abhik
contents The growth of Large Language Model (LLM) technology has raised expectations for automated coding. However, software engineering is more than coding and is concerned with activities including maintenance and evolution of a project. In this context, the concept of LLM agents has gained traction, which utilize LLMs as reasoning engines to invoke external tools autonomously. But is an LLM agent the same as an AI software engineer? In this paper, we seek to understand this question by developing a Unified Software Engineering agent or USEagent. Unlike existing work which builds specialized agents for specific software tasks such as testing, debugging, and repair, our goal is to build a unified agent which can orchestrate and handle multiple capabilities. This gives the agent the promise of handling complex scenarios in software development such as fixing an incomplete patch, adding new features, or taking over code written by others. We envision USEagent as the first draft of a future AI Software Engineer which can be a team member in future software development teams involving both AI and humans. To evaluate the efficacy of USEagent, we build a Unified Software Engineering bench (USEbench) comprising of myriad tasks such as coding, testing, and patching. USEbench is a judicious mixture of tasks from existing benchmarks such as SWE-bench, SWT-bench, and REPOCOD. In an evaluation on USEbench consisting of 1,271 repository-level software engineering tasks, USEagent shows improved efficacy compared to existing general agents such as OpenHands CodeActAgent. There exist gaps in the capabilities of USEagent for certain coding tasks, which provides hints on further developing the AI Software Engineer of the future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unified Software Engineering Agent as AI Software Engineer
Applis, Leonhard
Zhang, Yuntong
Liang, Shanchao
Jiang, Nan
Tan, Lin
Roychoudhury, Abhik
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
The growth of Large Language Model (LLM) technology has raised expectations for automated coding. However, software engineering is more than coding and is concerned with activities including maintenance and evolution of a project. In this context, the concept of LLM agents has gained traction, which utilize LLMs as reasoning engines to invoke external tools autonomously. But is an LLM agent the same as an AI software engineer? In this paper, we seek to understand this question by developing a Unified Software Engineering agent or USEagent. Unlike existing work which builds specialized agents for specific software tasks such as testing, debugging, and repair, our goal is to build a unified agent which can orchestrate and handle multiple capabilities. This gives the agent the promise of handling complex scenarios in software development such as fixing an incomplete patch, adding new features, or taking over code written by others. We envision USEagent as the first draft of a future AI Software Engineer which can be a team member in future software development teams involving both AI and humans. To evaluate the efficacy of USEagent, we build a Unified Software Engineering bench (USEbench) comprising of myriad tasks such as coding, testing, and patching. USEbench is a judicious mixture of tasks from existing benchmarks such as SWE-bench, SWT-bench, and REPOCOD. In an evaluation on USEbench consisting of 1,271 repository-level software engineering tasks, USEagent shows improved efficacy compared to existing general agents such as OpenHands CodeActAgent. There exist gaps in the capabilities of USEagent for certain coding tasks, which provides hints on further developing the AI Software Engineer of the future.
title Unified Software Engineering Agent as AI Software Engineer
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14683