How Do Practitioners Build SE Agents? Insights from a Mixed-Methods Study
The rise of Software Engineering (SE) agents, i.e., LLM-based agents that can understand large codebases and carry out engineering tasks with limited human intervention, has been marked by rapid advances and adoption, but little is known about how developers build these systems in practice: existing studies mine repositories or examine deployment, but few investigate how SE agents are constructed. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 practitioners from 12 organizations and an online survey of 80 practitioners, this paper is the first to study how SE processes are changing in the development of SE agents and what challenges developers face. We find that as implementation becomes chea...
| Authors | Yunbo Lyu, David Williams, Jieke Shi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 12 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 July 2026 |
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