Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research
  Roadmap
Authors: name: Ahmed E. Hassan; name: Hao Li; name: Dayi Lin; name: Bram Adams; name: Tse-Hsun Chen; name: Yutaro Kashiwa; name: Dong Qiu
Published: 2025-09-07 21:40:10

Abstract: 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.