Draft:Agentic software engineering
Submission declined on 30 August 2026 by FlammablePizza (talk). Per the previous two reviewers, I just don't see enough of a distinction from existing articles. There is Vibe coding for AI-led development, while there is AI-assisted software development that largely covers the rest of the spectrum, the last of which appears to have considerable overlap with this draft.
I see some substantial work here with useful clarifying edits since the last decline, but I don't see enough unique information to justify a content fork. New or useful material here could likely be merged into AI-assisted software development (with a potential fork later on if necessary), unless a clearer distinction with more unique information can be developed here to justify its existence.
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Submission declined on 23 August 2026 by Grapesurgeon (talk). Per previous comment, AI-assisted software development heavily overlaps with the scope of this article. Please merge in content from here to there, and do not resubmit this draft unless you can articulate how this is distinct. Declined by Grapesurgeon 34 days ago. | |
Comment: How is this article distinct from the existing article AI-assisted software development? M kuhner (talk) 23:47, 7 August 2026 (UTC)
 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. (July 2026) |
Agentic software engineering is an emerging area of software engineering concerned with the use of autonomous, goal-directed agents built on large language models to carry out software development tasks, and with the engineering of such agent systems themselves.[1][2] Whereas AI-assisted software development applies AI tools within existing development workflows, agentic software engineering has been framed as requiring a "radical reimagining" of the discipline's foundational elements — its actors, processes, tools, and artifacts — around agents pursuing goal-oriented objectives.[2]
Background
[edit]The application of software agents to engineering problems predates large language models; agent-oriented software engineering developed around multi-agent systems and associated design methodologies from the 1990s onward.[3] Interest in the area was renewed following the introduction of large language models capable of multi-step tool use, which enabled agents to operate across tasks including requirements analysis, coding, testing, and deployment.[4][1]
Research
[edit]A systematic literature review published in IEEE Access in 2026 surveyed methods and techniques in the area, drawing on 61 studies published between 2022 and 2025 and identifying approaches based on autonomous coding, multi-agent systems, iterative refinement, and human–agent collaboration.[1] The review applies an autonomy rating across the studies it surveys, spanning approaches from individual AI-assisted tools to fully autonomous multi-agent systems, and reports that industrial adoption has generally involved narrower agent roles rather than fully autonomous end-to-end workflows.[1] Proposals in the area have framed the shift as requiring a reorganization of software engineering's foundational elements — its actors, processes, tools, and artifacts — rather than the addition of tools within existing workflows.[2][5] Other research addresses agent architectures and coordination,[3] questions of trust and verification in agent-produced software,[6] and proposed research roadmaps for the field.[2] In April 2026, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society sponsored a workshop on the subject, co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering in Rio de Janeiro.[7]
Terminology
[edit]Terminology in the field is not settled, and competing variants are in concurrent use.[8] In February 2026, Andrej Karpathy proposed the term agentic engineering for work in which developers orchestrate coding agents and act as oversight rather than writing code directly, in contrast to vibe coding.[9] The 2026 ACM/IEEE workshop was titled "Agentic Engineering", while papers presented at it generally used the phrase "agentic software engineering".[7][5]
References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 Otoum, Nesreen; Elkhalili, Nuha (2026). "Methods and Techniques of Agentic Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review". IEEE Access. 14: 7443–7465. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3652325.
- 1 2 3 4 Hassan, Ahmed E.; Li, Hao; Lin, Dayi; et al. (2025). "Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap". arXiv:2509.06216 [cs.SE].
- 1 2 He, Junda; Treude, Christoph; Lo, David (2025). "LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision, and the Road Ahead". ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 34 (5): 1–30. doi:10.1145/3712003.
- ↑ Wang, Yanlin; Zhong, Wanjun; Huang, Yanxian; et al. (2025). "Agents in software engineering: survey, landscape, and vision". Automated Software Engineering. 32 (2). doi:10.1007/s10515-025-00544-2.
- 1 2 Feldt, Robert; Lenberg, Per; Frattini, Julian; Parthasarathy, Dhasarathy (2026). "The Semi-Executable Stack: Agentic Software Engineering and the Expanding Scope of SE". arXiv:2604.15468 [cs.SE].
- ↑ Roychoudhury, Abhik; Păsăreanu, Corina; Pradel, Michael; Ray, Baishakhi (2026). "Agentic AI Software Engineers: Programming with Trust". Communications of the ACM. 69 (5): 56–58. doi:10.1145/3769314.
- 1 2 "AGENT '26: International Workshop on Agentic Engineering". International Conference on Software Engineering 2026. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
- ↑ Hoda, Rashina (2025). "Toward Agentic Software Engineering Beyond Code: Framing Vision, Values, and Vocabulary". arXiv:2510.19692 [cs.SE].
- ↑ Taft, Darryl K. (February 10, 2026). "Vibe Coding Is Passé. Karpathy Has a New Name for the Future of Software". The New Stack. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
Category:Software engineering Category:Artificial intelligence Category:Large language models