Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research
  Roadmap
Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent
agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex,
goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring
trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in
the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE
for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational
pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest
differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to
support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command
center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such
as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The
Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform
tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex
trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated
human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering
activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating
the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This
paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision,
outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper
culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and
opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on
SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a
conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide
dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric
tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a1
Ahmed E. Hassan
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a2
Hao Li
claimed_verified
2025-09-19T06:48:14.213Z
62b4f3b7464e664268bf4e85
/avatars/16e79e11a8734b1d241e0f0c55a54045.svg
Leo
user
hao-li
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a3
Dayi Lin
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a4
Bram Adams
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a5
Tse-Hsun Chen
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a6
Yutaro Kashiwa
68cccbb93df9ac65e93dc6a7
Dong Qiu
Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research
  Roadmap
Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent
agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex,
goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring
trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in
the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE
for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational
pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest
differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to
support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command
center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such
as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The
Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform
tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex
trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated
human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering
activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating
the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This
paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision,
outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper
culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and
opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on
SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a
conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide
dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric
tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.
Agentic Software Engineering introduces a dual modality approach with human and agent collaboration, redefining software engineering processes and tools to achieve complex, goal-oriented objectives.
Agentic Software Engineering SE 3.0 intelligent agents SE for Humans SE for Agents Actor Command Environment Agent Execution Environment Merge-Readiness Packs Consultation Request Packs human-AI collaboration Structured Agentic Software Engineering