While LLM-based multi-agent systems show potential for large-scale software development, successful integration requires addressing challenges such as memory limitations, hallucinations, and code smells, alongside a practitioner-centric perspective.
Abstract
Context: LLM-based multi-agent systems enable automation and decision support in software development, yet existing studies rely on benchmark datasets offering only binary pass-or-fail results, limiting insight into real-world applicability. Objective: This study empirically investigates the potential and limitations of LLM-based agents in autonomous software development tasks. Method: A two-phase approach was employed: developing a multi-agent system, CodePori, for automated code generation, and conducting participant-based evaluation to assess practical performance. Results: Participant feedback reveals key strengths, challenges, and areas for improvement in LLM-based multi-agent systems, highlighting aspects missed by standard code-generation benchmarks. Conclusions: While LLM-based multi-agent systems show potential for large-scale software development, successful integration requires addressing challenges such as memory limitations, hallucinations, and code smells, alongside a practitioner-centric perspective.
A comprehensive overview of the existing tools and frameworks for implementing MAS in software engineering and a set of lessons learned and challenges that can help researchers and practitioners to select a suitable MAS framework according to their needs are provided.
Maria Sâmyla Serafim de Oliveira, M. Ibiyo, Marco Gianrusso et al.· 0 citations
This paper studies autonomous software development, in which LLM-based coding agents transform high-level requirements into complete, functional, and usable software systems without human intervention. We introduce Harness-of-Harness (HoH), a framework that enables coding agents to continually improve software during autonomous development. HoH operates on existing coding-agent harnesses, and organizes their executions into iterative planning-coding-testing loops. To sustain improvement across loops, HoH balances repair with capability growth, scopes development into small and verifiable increments, separates implementation-time testing from independent evaluation, and constrains verifiable outputs rather than prescribing agent workflows. It progressively exposes deliverables, role-specific tools, and skills, encourages reuse rather than recreation, and maintains versioned project histories. On GameCraft-Bench, FrontierSWE, and ProgramBench, three harness-model pairs (Codex with GPT-5.5, OpenCode with DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and Pi with MiniMax-M3), HoH consistently outperforms the corresponding standalone harnesses, achieving an average relative gain of 52.25 percent and a maximum gain of 82.86 percent after three iterations. In a multi-day deployment with more than 70 iterations, HoH autonomously develops a first-person-shooter game, featuring a coherent storyline, fully implemented core mechanics, human-playable experience, polished visuals and integrated audio. Github: https://github.com/Flesymeb/HarnessOfHarness Project Page: https://flesymeb.github.io/HarnessOfHarness/
Hao Yan, Min-Le Su, Hangfan Zhang et al.· 0 citations
This paper constructs a large-scale dataset of agent applications, tools, and tests, and manually label 2,572 test methods from 240 modules, and derives a taxonomy of 23 testing patterns across test fixtures, data, objectives, and assertions, and characterize tests by level.
Rangeet Pan, Tyler Stennett, D. Sankar et al.· 1 citation
A unified, taxonomy-driven, and deployment-oriented survey of agentic AI systems, synthesizing recent advances through a modular reference architecture and a four-dimensional taxonomy that characterizes agents along the axes of autonomy, tool use, collaboration, and safety–governance is presented.
Sparsh Bajoria, Shreyanshu Ranjan, Adhitya M et al.· Cognitive Computation· 0 citations
A configurable multi-agent framework for benchmarking LLMs in Prolog code generation that combines a Code Generator Agent, a deterministic execution layer using SWI-Prolog, and an evaluator based on the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm that supports model-agnostic experimentation and evaluates outputs across functional correctness, efficiency, structural properties and evaluator reliability.
Nikolaos Karamousalidis, P. Kefalas· SN Computer Science· 0 citations
Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for complex tasks requiring autonomous planning, tool use, and inter-agent coordination. However, the non-deterministic nature of LLM outputs and the emergent behavior arising from agent interactions render traditional test oracles ineffective, creating a critical gap in quality assurance for agentic AI. This work introduces MORPHAGENT, a framework designed to address the oracle problem in multi-agent LLM systems through trace-based behavioral analysis. Our contributions are threefold: (1) goal-preservation relations that verify consistent goal achievement under input perturbations, (2) coordination-consistency relations that validate inter-agent delegation and communication patterns under agent substitution and reordering, and (3) tool-use integrity relations that ensure semantic equivalence of tool invocation sequences under prompt paraphrasing. MorphAgent instruments agent execution to capture structured traces comprising planning steps, tool calls, message exchanges, and final outputs, then systematically applies metamorphic transformations and checks behavioral invariants without requiring ground-truth oracles. We evaluate the framework on four multi-agent benchmarks spanning code generation, research synthesis, customer service, and data analysis tasks, encompassing 2,840 source-followup execution pairs across three LLM backends. Results show that MORPHAGENT detects 82.0% of seeded behavioral faults, including 90.3% of coordination failures and 81.7% of goal-deviation faults, while maintaining a false positive rate of 6.1%. The framework uncovers 14 previously unreported behavioral anomalies in established multi-agent frameworks, demonstrating its practical utility for assuring agentic AI reliability. These results suggest that trace-based metamorphic testing can serve as a practical foundation for reliable validation of emerging agentic AI systems.
Gopalakrishnan Marimuthu· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Computer-use AI agents struggle with multi-step workflows like email and customer support. Echoverse trains agents in realistic environments rather than simply providing more training tasks, helping them improve as the tasks, tests, and environments evolve. The post Echoverse: Deep, evolving environments for computer-use agents appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduJul 22, 2026
Known for his clear and elegant writing style, Bertsekas shaped fields from control and optimization to large-scale computation and artificial intelligence.
