Daily Papers

Training coding agents typically updates the policy while keeping the harness fixed. During training, trajectories reveal flawed repair strategies and interaction problems that vary across tasks and change as the policy learns. We introduce HarnessAdapt-RL, which trains the policy and adapts its harness during reinforcement learning. For flawed repair strategies, a frozen teacher generates task-specific mechanism-level skills. For interaction problems recurring across tasks, a separate teacher model evolves tools and hooks, keeping each change only if it improves the observed pass rate or the observed trainable rate without lowering either. The policy trains with the adapted harness, and its new trajectories guide further adaptation. With a 9B base model, HarnessAdapt-RL improves pass@1 over GRPO by 9.8, 12.6, and 6.4 percentage points on SWE-bench Verified, Multilingual, and Pro, and outperforms GRPO with the human-designed OpenHands harness. Gains from mechanism-level skills persist after their removal at evaluation. Re-evolving tools and hooks as the policy changes outperforms freezing early versions. Removing them at deployment, in contrast, costs up to 7.7 percentage points. Training therefore produces a model-harness pair: the trained policy and the evolved tools and hooks, with skills removed at deployment.

Harness evolution improves an LLM agent's prompts, tools, and workflow, while the optimizer's own tools and procedures often remain fixed. We study whether an optimizer can improve another agent more effectively by also improving how it diagnoses failures, develops edits, and tests their effects. Two observations guide our design. In a controlled study, optimizer self-evolution fails to improve performance without execution-based verification, but achieves the best result of that study when verification is available. Across five executors, self-evolving optimizers build their own tools for failure analysis, verification, training audits, and workflow control. Motivated by these findings, we introduce VERSE, a Verified Self-Evolving optimizer for agent harnesses. VERSE lets the optimizer test draft edits, replay failures, and perturb suspected steps before submission, while tracking fixes and regressions across rounds. Using this feedback, the optimizer revises both the executor harness and its own prompts, skills, tools, hooks, and notes, while the weights of the optimizer and executor models stay fixed. Under a shared protocol with disjoint training, validation, and test tasks, VERSE improves all four evaluated harness optimizers on held-out SWE-rebench tasks and newer out-of-distribution tasks in five languages. Its best validation-selected harness reaches 42.3% and 37.7% accuracy, respectively, against 39.2% and 29.3% for the strongest baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/wzekai/VERSE.

Agent harnesses (the system prompt, tool set, execution hooks, and context-management scaffolding around a model) are a critical determinant of agentic task success. Automated harness evolution can enable smaller models to perform well on domain-specific tasks at a fraction of frontier-model cost. Since both the harness and model weights shape behavior, we ask how harness evolution and lightweight fine-tuning should be combined. Across seven enterprise agent tasks, we first evolve a harness with the weaker model, then find that a stronger expert often uses it more effectively, suggesting expert supervision could close the remaining gap. However, training the weaker model on the expert's complete trajectories under the evolved harness backfires: performance regresses on all seven tasks by 4 to 30 points across Qwen3-Coder and Gemma 4, even though the same procedure helps under the unevolved harness. Our analysis shows that imitation transfers knowledge and increases scaffold usage, but disrupts model-harness fit: the weaker model adopts the expert's planning strategy without the competence to execute it and no longer matches the harness evolved around its native planning style. We therefore develop an on-policy expert-correction pipeline, automated by a meta-level MLE agent, that localizes the failing turn in the weaker model's own rollout and asks the expert to rewrite only that turn. This preserves the model's planning style and combines the gains of harness evolution and model adaptation. Our results identify and resolve a source of contention between harness and weight updates, yielding a compatibility-preserving recipe for economical co-evolution on domain-specific enterprise tasks.

Coding agents can answer analytical questions over a data lake by discovering, cleaning, and joining the relevant data. However, they discard this work after each question and redo it from scratch for the next one. Tool evolution, which automatically builds and refines reusable tools across tasks, is a natural fit for this repetition. Since a ground-truth label for a data-lake question requires an expert to solve it first, we consider the unsupervised setting. We propose TEAL (Tool Evolution for Analytics over data Lakes), which evolves a library of tools and usage skills for a given Worker agent without labels. Two agents propose tools from complementary evidence, an Explorer from the data lake itself and a Critic from Worker trajectories. A proposed change is kept only if the Worker adopts the tool on a rerun without extra steps and any changed answer is supported by trajectory evidence. We also introduce TEAL-Q, which generates synthetic questions for tool evolution when real ones are unavailable. We evaluate on KramaBench and LakeQA with four Worker LLMs under step budgets, which cap the number of steps the Worker may take per question. With a tight budget of 10 or 15 steps, TEAL improves every Worker on both benchmarks, lifting Sonnet-5 at 15 steps by 9.3 points on KramaBench and 21.7 points on LakeQA. A tighter budget also yields better feedback for evolution. For example, Sonnet-5's LakeQA library evolved at 20 steps and deployed unchanged at 30 steps scores 68.3, above both the baseline (59.6) and a library evolved directly at 30 steps (64.2). Additionally, a library evolved on synthetic questions performs comparably to one evolved on real questions. These results show that useful tools can be evolved without labels, and hopefully inspire future work on what to evolve and how to obtain feedback in unsupervised agent evolution.

Prompting and fine-tuning have emerged as two competing paradigms for augmenting language models with new capabilities, such as the use of tools. Prompting approaches are quick to set up but rely on providing explicit demonstrations of each tool's usage in the model's prompt, thus coupling tool use to the task at hand and limiting generalisation. Fine-tuning removes the need for task-specific demonstrations of tool usage at runtime; however, this ties new capabilities to a single model, thus making already-heavier setup costs a recurring expense. In this paper, we introduce language hooks, a novel framework for augmenting language models with new capabilities that is decoupled both from the model's task-specific prompt and from the model itself. The language hook algorithm interleaves text generation by the base model with the execution of modular programs that trigger conditionally based on the existing text and the available capabilities. Upon triggering, programs may call external tools, auxiliary language models (e.g. using tool specific prompts), and modify the existing context. We benchmark our method against state-of-the-art baselines, find that it outperforms task-aware approaches, and demonstrate its ability to generalise to novel tasks.

Conventional agent systems often struggle in open-ended environments where task distributions continuously drift and external supervision is scarce. Their reliance on static toolsets or offline training lags behind these dynamics, leaving the system's capability boundaries rigid and unknown. To address this, we propose the In-Situ Self-Evolving paradigm. This approach treats sequential task interactions as a continuous stream of experience, enabling the system to distill short-term execution feedback into long-term, reusable capabilities without access to ground-truth labels. Within this framework, we identify tool evolution as the critical pathway for capability expansion, which provides verifiable, binary feedback signals. Within this framework, we develop Yunjue Agent, a system that iteratively synthesizes, optimizes, and reuses tools to navigate emerging challenges. To optimize evolutionary efficiency, we further introduce a Parallel Batch Evolution strategy. Empirical evaluations across five diverse benchmarks under a zero-start setting demonstrate significant performance gains over proprietary baselines. Additionally, complementary warm-start evaluations confirm that the accumulated general knowledge can be seamlessly transferred to novel domains. Finally, we propose a novel metric to monitor evolution convergence, serving as a function analogous to training loss in conventional optimization. We open-source our codebase, system traces, and evolved tools to facilitate future research in resilient, self-evolving intelligence.

Research on self-evolving language agents has accelerated, drawing increasing attention to their ability to create, adapt, and maintain tools from task requirements. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on predefined specifications, which limits scalability and hinders truly autonomous evolution. While recent studies attempt to dynamically generate tools, they primarily emphasize downstream performance, resulting in a "black-box" evaluation that makes it difficult to attribute failures to specific causes. To address this, we propose Tool-Genesis, a diagnostic benchmark designed to quantify agent capabilities across multiple dimensions, including interface compliance, functional correctness, and downstream utility. Tool-Genesis evaluates whether agents can construct task-relevant tools solely from abstract requirements (without preset specifications) and use them to solve realistic problems. Crucially, we find that even state-of-the-art models struggle to produce precise tool interfaces or executable logic in a one-shot setting. These minor initial flaws are amplified through the pipeline, leading to a sharp degradation in downstream metrics. We hope Tool-Genesis will guide future research toward training and steering models to synthesize persistent, general-purpose tools that better address real-world challenges.

Harness self-evolution revises an agent's software scaffolding, including prompts, memory, workflows, and executable components, while keeping model weights fixed. We formalize a feedback-driven process in which accepted revisions persist across runs. The framework separates update targets from proposal and admission mechanisms. It distinguishes changes to interpreted state from revisions to tools and code, repository-level control logic, and plugin composition. We characterize search through evolutionary optimization and examine its reliability through continual PAC-learning. Under explicit assumptions, the analysis yields an expected generalization bound, a retention bound conditional on historical regression budgets, and a high-probability admission rule using fresh, independent validation data. We examine how persistent harness revisions affect knowledge sharing and organizational workflows, with implications for scientific reliability, physical safety, and institutional accountability. Cases from prior work illustrate model--harness co-design, distributed execution, and plugin reuse. Reliable deployment requires continual validation as task distributions and evaluators change, with independent safeguards for learning, runtime privileges, and consequential actions. We provide a comprehensive 66-page discussion of related work, theory, algorithms, evaluation, applications, and the broader impact of Harness RSI, together with continuously updated code and supplementary materials, at https://github.com/zgcagi/Harness-RSI.

The tool-using capability of large language models (LLMs) enables them to access up-to-date external information and handle complex tasks. Current approaches to enhancing this capability primarily rely on distilling advanced models by data synthesis. However, this method incurs significant costs associated with advanced model usage and often results in data compatibility issues, led by the high discrepancy in the knowledge scope between the advanced model and the target model. To address these challenges, we propose ToolACE-DEV, a self-improving framework for tool learning. First, we decompose the tool-learning objective into sub-tasks that enhance basic tool-making and tool-using abilities. Then, we introduce a self-evolving paradigm that allows lightweight models to self-improve, reducing reliance on advanced LLMs. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach across models of varying scales and architectures.

AI agents increasingly rely on external tools to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. Advancing such agents requires reproducible evaluation and large-scale training in controllable, diverse, and realistic tool-use environments. However, real-world APIs are limited in availability, domain coverage, and stability, often requiring access keys and imposing rate limits, which render them impractical for stable evaluation or scalable training. To address these challenges, we introduce SynthTools, a flexible and scalable framework for generating synthetic tool ecosystems. Our framework consists of three core components: Tool Generation for automatic and scalable creation of diverse tools, Tool Simulation to emulate realistic tool behaviors, and Tool Audit to ensure correctness and consistency of tool simulation. To illustrate its scalability, we show that SynthTools can readily produce toolsets that span twice as many domains and twice as many tools per domain as prior work. Furthermore, the tool simulation and tool audit components demonstrate strong reliability, achieving 94% and 99% accuracy respectively. Finally, we construct downstream tasks from the generated tools that even state-of-the-art models struggle to complete. By enabling scalable, diverse, and reliable tool ecosystems, SynthTools provides a practical path toward large-scale training and stable evaluation of tool-use agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/namkoong-lab/SynthTools.

LLM-powered tool-calling agents fulfill user requests by interacting with environments, querying data, and invoking tools in a multi-turn process. Yet, most existing benchmarks evaluate these systems under static environment interfaces, with fixed schemas and toolsets, making it difficult to assess how agents behave as environments evolves -- when capabilities are added, reorganized, or deprecated across successive environment versions. In this paper, we study structured environment evolution as a benchmark-construction problem for tool-calling agents. We propose ProEvolve, a graph-based framework that makes environment evolution programmable. At its core, a typed relational graph provides a unified, explicit representation of the environment - data, tools, and schema. Under this formalism, adding, removing, or modifying capabilities are expressed as graph transformations that coherently propagate updates across tools, schemas, and data access. Building on this, ProEvolve supports (1) automatic generation of evolved executable environments through explicit graph transformations, and (2) graph-grounded construction of task sandboxes via subgraph sampling and instantiation. We validate ProEvolve in two tool-calling domains, e-commerce and airline booking, in terms of quality, implementation validity, and failure modes. Finally, we use the generated benchmark as a downstream diagnostic to study how representative agents behave under structured environment evolution.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in tool-making, yet existing frameworks often struggle to efficiently construct reliable toolsets and are limited to single-task settings. To address these challenges, we propose GATE (Graph-based Adaptive Tool Evolution), an adaptive framework that dynamically constructs and evolves a hierarchical graph of reusable tools across multiple scenarios. We evaluate GATE on open-ended tasks (Minecraft), agent-based tasks (TextCraft, DABench), and code generation tasks (MATH, Date, TabMWP). Our results show that GATE achieves up to 4.3x faster milestone completion in Minecraft compared to the previous SOTA, and provides an average improvement of 9.23% over existing tool-making methods in code generation tasks and 10.03% in agent tasks. GATE demonstrates the power of adaptive evolution, balancing tool quantity, complexity, and functionality while maintaining high efficiency. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ayanami2003/GATE.

Tool utilization enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to interact with the real world and resolve complex tasks. However, existing agent frameworks predominantly rely on static toolsets composed of granular atomic actions (e.g., basic file I/O or single-turn search), which forces agents to reinvent low-level logic for every recurring workflow, leading to increased reasoning overhead and failure rates. In this study, we propose that agents can achieve self-evolution by synthesizing these atomic actions into reusable Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which function as callable higher-order tools that encapsulate multi-step logic. We further introduce EvoSOP, a framework that empowers agents to extract SOPs from execution trajectories and iteratively optimize the toolset through a systematic lifecycle of construction, merging, evaluation, and pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoSOP significantly boosts task success rates while substantially reducing the number of interaction rounds compared to baselines. Our analysis also reveals that iterative tool optimization fosters reliable and efficient tool-use patterns, providing a scalable pathway for the development of self-evolving agents.

Large language models (LLMs) can now access a wide range of external tools, thanks to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This greatly expands their abilities as various agents. However, LLMs rely entirely on the text descriptions of tools to decide which ones to use--a process that is surprisingly fragile. In this work, we expose a vulnerability in prevalent tool/function-calling protocols by investigating a series of edits to tool descriptions, some of which can drastically increase a tool's usage from LLMs when competing with alternatives. Through controlled experiments, we show that tools with properly edited descriptions receive over 10 times more usage from GPT-4.1 and Qwen2.5-7B than tools with original descriptions. We further evaluate how various edits to tool descriptions perform when competing directly with one another and how these trends generalize or differ across a broader set of 10 different models. These phenomenons, while giving developers a powerful way to promote their tools, underscore the need for a more reliable foundation for agentic LLMs to select and utilize tools and resources.

The rapid evolution of software libraries presents a significant challenge for code generation models, which must adapt to frequent version updates while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. Existing code completion benchmarks often overlook this dynamic aspect, and the one that does consider it relies on static code prediction tasks without execution-based evaluation, offering a limited perspective on a model's practical usability. To address this gap, we introduce \GitChameleon{}, a novel, manually curated dataset comprising 116 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. is designed to rigorously assess the ability of modern large language models (LLMs) to generate version-specific code that is not only syntactically correct but also functionally accurate upon execution. Our comprehensive evaluations reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with this task; for instance, GPT-4o achieves a pass@10 of only 39.9\% (43.7\% when provided with error feedback), highlighting the complexity of the problem and the limitations of current models. By providing an execution-based benchmark that emphasizes the dynamic nature of code libraries, serves as a critical tool to advance the development of more adaptable and reliable code generation models. For facilitation for further exploration of version-conditioned code generation, we make our code repository publicly accessible at https://github.com/NizarIslah/GitChameleon.

Tool learning enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and APIs, greatly expanding the application scope of LLMs. However, due to the dynamic nature of external environments, these tools and APIs may become outdated over time, preventing LLMs from correctly invoking tools. Existing research primarily focuses on static environments and overlooks this issue, limiting the adaptability of LLMs in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose ToolEVO, a novel framework designed to enhance the adaptive and reflective capabilities of LLMs against tool variability. By leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search, ToolEVO facilitates active exploration and interaction of LLMs within dynamic environments, allowing for autonomous self-reflection and self-updating of tool usage based on environmental feedback. Additionally, we introduce ToolQA-D, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the impact of tool variability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our approach, highlighting the importance of adaptability to tool variability for effective tool learning.

Code evolution is inevitable in modern software development. Changes to third-party APIs frequently break existing code and complicate maintenance, posing practical challenges for developers. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation, they struggle to reason without a structured representation of these evolving relationships, often leading them to produce outdated APIs or invalid outputs. In this work, we propose a knowledge graph-augmented framework that decomposes the migration task into two synergistic stages: evolution path retrieval and path-informed code generation. Our approach constructs static and dynamic API graphs to model intra-version structures and cross-version transitions, enabling structured reasoning over API evolution. Both modules are trained with synthetic supervision automatically derived from real-world API diffs, ensuring scalability and minimal human effort. Extensive experiments across single-package and multi-package benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves migration accuracy, controllability, and execution success over standard LLM baselines. The source code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/kangjz1203/KCoEvo.

The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent version updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51\% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.

The central challenge of AI for Science is not reasoning alone, but the ability to create computational methods in an open-ended scientific world. Existing LLM-based agents rely on static, pre-defined tool libraries, a paradigm that fundamentally fails in scientific domains where tools are sparse, heterogeneous, and intrinsically incomplete. In this paper, we propose Test-Time Tool Evolution (TTE), a new paradigm that enables agents to synthesize, verify, and evolve executable tools during inference. By transforming tools from fixed resources into problem-driven artifacts, TTE overcomes the rigidity and long-tail limitations of static tool libraries. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciEvo, a benchmark comprising 1,590 scientific reasoning tasks supported by 925 automatically evolved tools. Extensive experiments show that TTE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and tool efficiency, while enabling effective cross-domain adaptation of computational tools. The code and benchmark have been released at https://github.com/lujiaxuan0520/Test-Time-Tool-Evol.

We present StarHarness, a framework for evolving environment-specific agent harnesses while keeping model weights fixed. The evolved harness can include prompt and task framing, tool interfaces, skills, MCP-backed providers, subagent structure, and agent-loop configuration. StarHarness constructs a compact evolution pool by stratifying tasks according to baseline failure behavior, separates proposer-visible search tasks from proposer-hidden selection tasks, and reserves held-out tasks for evaluating generalization. Across ITBench SRE, EnterpriseOps-Gym ITSM, and AutomationBench Finance, harness evolution improves full-benchmark performance by 20-35 percentage points over the default harness after 4-12 accepted changes per environment. These gains persist on tasks excluded from evolution and transfer without re-evolution across GPT and Qwen model families. Trace analysis links the improvements to interface repairs, environment conventions, and operational knowledge that compresses search, with fewer false-positive diagnoses and shorter trajectories in several settings. StarHarness therefore offers a practical way to reduce persistent model-environment mismatch in tool-rich enterprise tasks.

External tools help large language models succeed at tasks where they would otherwise typically fail. In existing frameworks, choosing tools at test time relies on naive greedy decoding, regardless of whether the model has been fine-tuned on tool-annotated data or prompted with in-context examples. In contrast, we find that gathering and choosing among a suitable set of candidate tools has greater potential to lead to an optimal selection. We present Tool selECTion via meta-reasONing (TECTON), a two-phase system that first reasons over a task and outputs candidate tools using a custom fine-tuned language modelling head. Then, with the custom head disabled, it meta-reasons (i.e., it reasons over the previous reasoning process) to make a final choice. We show that TECTON results in substantial gains--both in-distribution and out-of-distribution--on a range of math reasoning datasets.

We introduce **EvoGraph**, a framework that enables software systems to evolve their own source code, build pipelines, documentation, and tickets. EvoGraph represents every artefact in a typed directed graph, applies learned mutation operators driven by specialized small language models (SLMs), and selects survivors with a multi-objective fitness. On three benchmarks, EvoGraph fixes 83% of known security vulnerabilities, translates COBOL to Java with 93% functional equivalence (test verified), and maintains documentation freshness within two minutes. Experiments show a 40% latency reduction and a sevenfold drop in feature lead time compared with strong baselines. We extend our approach to **evoGraph**, leveraging language-specific SLMs for modernizing .NET, Lisp, CGI, ColdFusion, legacy Python, and C codebases, achieving 82-96% semantic equivalence across languages while reducing computational costs by 90% compared to large language models. EvoGraph's design responds to empirical failure modes in legacy modernization, such as implicit contracts, performance preservation, and integration evolution. Our results suggest a practical path toward Software 3.0, where systems adapt continuously yet remain under measurable control.

The harness surrounding a language model is a central determinant of agent performance. Recent methods optimize harnesses by searching over complete programs, where individual mechanisms are difficult to isolate and reuse. We introduce PluginRSI, which represents a harness as a composition of atomized plugins and organizes harness evolution around these plugins. Individual plugins are improved independently and accumulated in a shared library, then recombined into new harnesses at each iteration. PluginRSI improves over existing harness optimization methods across software engineering, command-line interaction, and question-answering tasks. The resulting harnesses retain their advantage when transferred to other solver models without further optimization. The evolved plugin library accelerates subsequent optimization from the initial harness, which helps faster and higher convergence on unseen tasks. These results show that accumulating reusable mechanisms provides an effective basis for continued harness improvement.

Recent work such as AlphaEvolve has shown that combining LLM-driven optimization with evolutionary search can effectively improve programs, prompts, and algorithms across domains. In this paradigm, previously evaluated solutions are reused to guide the model toward new candidate solutions. Crucially, the effectiveness of this evolution process depends on the search strategy: how prior solutions are selected and varied to generate new candidates. However, most existing methods rely on fixed search strategies with predefined knobs (e.g., explore-exploit ratios) that remain static throughout execution. While effective in some settings, these approaches often fail to adapt across tasks, or even within the same task as the search space changes over time. We introduce EvoX, an adaptive evolution method that optimizes its own evolution process. EvoX jointly evolves candidate solutions and the search strategies used to generate them, continuously updating how prior solutions are selected and varied based on progress. This enables the system to dynamically shift between different search strategies during the optimization process. Across nearly 200 real-world optimization tasks, EvoX outperforms existing AI-driven evolutionary methods including AlphaEvolve, OpenEvolve, GEPA, and ShinkaEvolve on the majority of tasks.

The capability of a modern AI agent depends not only on its foundation model but also on its harness, which constructs prompts, manages state, invokes tools, and coordinates execution. As models, APIs, environments, and requirements evolve, the harness must be continually modified. Before such a change can be made, a developer or coding agent must identify all code locations that implement the target behavior. This is difficult because production harnesses are large, tightly coupled, and behaviorally distributed, while modification requests describe what the system should do and repositories are organized by files and modules. Code search, repository indexing, and long-context processing ease inspection, but still leave this behavior-to-code mapping to be recovered by hand. Behavior localization is therefore a central bottleneck in harness evolution. We introduce the Harness Handbook, a behavior-centric representation synthesized automatically from a harness codebase via static analysis and LLM-assisted structuring, linking each behavior to its corresponding source. We also introduce Behavior-Guided Progressive Disclosure (BGPD), which guides agents from high-level behaviors to relevant implementation details and verifies candidate locations against the current source. On diverse modification requests from two open-source harnesses, Handbook-Assisted planning improves behavior localization and edit-plan quality while using fewer planner tokens, with the largest gains on scattered sites, rarely executed paths, and cross-module interactions. Evolving complex agentic systems thus depends not only on generating edits, but also on determining where those edits should be made.

As large language models (LLMs) advance, their inability to autonomously execute tasks by directly interacting with external tools remains a critical limitation. Traditional methods rely on inputting tool descriptions as context, which is constrained by context length and requires separate, often inefficient, retrieval mechanisms. We introduce ToolGen, a paradigm shift that integrates tool knowledge directly into the LLM's parameters by representing each tool as a unique token. This enables the LLM to generate tool calls and arguments as part of its next token prediction capabilities, seamlessly blending tool invocation with language generation. Our framework allows the LLM to access and utilize a vast amount of tools with no additional retrieval step, significantly enhancing both performance and scalability. Experimental results with over 47,000 tools show that ToolGen not only achieves superior results in both tool retrieval and autonomous task completion but also sets the stage for a new era of AI agents that can adapt to tools across diverse domains. By fundamentally transforming tool retrieval into a generative process, ToolGen paves the way for more versatile, efficient, and autonomous AI systems. ToolGen enables end-to-end tool learning and opens opportunities for integration with other advanced techniques such as chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning, thereby expanding the practical capabilities of LLMs.

Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

Tools serve as pivotal interfaces that enable humans to understand and reshape the world. With the advent of foundational models, AI systems can utilize tools to expand their capabilities and interact with the world. Existing tool learning methodologies, encompassing supervised fine-tuning and prompt engineering approaches, often induce language models to utilize tools indiscriminately, as complex problems often exceed their own competencies. However, introducing tools for simple tasks, which the models themselves can readily resolve, can inadvertently propagate errors rather than enhance performance. This leads to the research question: can we teach language models when and how to use tools? To meet this need, we propose Tool leaRning wIth exeCution fEedback (TRICE), a two-stage end-to-end framework that enables the model to continually learn through feedback derived from tool execution, thereby learning when and how to use tools effectively. Experimental results, backed by further analysis, show that TRICE can make the language model to selectively use tools by decreasing the model's dependency on tools while enhancing the performance. Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/zjunlp/trice.

Rapidly evolving software libraries require coding language models to use unfamiliar APIs. Yet failed solutions alone tell us little about what API knowledge models need or how to provide it. We present NovelAPIBench, an automated diagnostic framework that builds benchmarks around the API knowledge gaps of a target model. It identifies novel APIs, generates executable coding tasks with separately controllable knowledge components, and classifies failures into six categories. The framework can be rerun as models and libraries evolve. We study 21 libraries across five domains and six backbone models, with our primary benchmark comprising 1,670 tasks covering 856 APIs. Our experiments show that when supplied directly, usage examples provide the strongest standalone guidance for novel API acquisition, and combining them with signature descriptions approaches full-knowledge performance. Retrieving this knowledge from a pool of APIs yields lower accuracy than supplying only the target API's knowledge, even when retrieval finds the target. Fine-tuning on other APIs improves performance on unseen APIs mainly when external knowledge is supplied, helping models both select the target API and integrate it into the surrounding code. These findings highlight complementary roles for external API knowledge and the ability to apply it. By separating knowledge content, delivery, and use, NovelAPIBench helps diagnose what limits novel API use and guides adaptation to evolving libraries. Code and data are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/NovelAPIBench.

Agentic evolution has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving programs, workflows, and scientific solutions by iteratively generating candidates, evaluating them, and using feedback to guide future search. However, existing methods are typically instantiated either as fixed hand-designed procedures that are modular but rigid, or as general-purpose agents that flexibly integrate feedback but can drift in long-horizon evolution. Both forms accumulate rich evidence over time, including candidates, feedback, traces, and failures, yet lack a stable interface for organizing this evidence and revising the mechanism that drives future evolution. We address this limitation by formulating agentic evolution as an interactive environment, where the accumulated evolution context serves as a process-level state. We introduce AEvo, a harnessed meta-editing framework in which a meta-agent observes this state and acts not by directly proposing the next candidate, but by editing the procedure or agent context that controls future evolution. This unified interface enables AEvo to steer both procedure-based and agent-based evolution, making accumulated evidence actionable for long-horizon search. Empirical evaluations on agentic and reasoning benchmarks show that AEvo outperforms five evolution baselines, achieving a 26 relative improvement over the strongest baseline. Across three open-ended optimization tasks, AEvo further outperforms four evolution baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance under the same iteration budget.

AI coding agents, software tools that automate development tasks through reasoning and tool use, are increasingly extended through plugin marketplaces, yet the structure, maintenance, and co-evolution dynamics of these emerging repositories remain empirically unexplored. Unlike traditional software packages that deliver functionality through source code, agent plugins deliver functionality through a combination of natural-language instruction files, scripts, and configuration files, raising the question of whether these plugins are maintained artifacts that co-evolve across components, or one-off artifacts that developers write once and do not need to revisit. To study the maintenance and co-evolution of agent plugins, we conduct an empirical study of 1,926 repositories hosting Claude Code plugin marketplaces, analyzing 8,351 plugins and 77,773 commits across 2,018 marketplaces. We find that the marketplace is expanding rapidly, plugin-touching commit activity growing 8.8x over six months after the October 2025 launch, and plugins targeting Software Engineering tasks accounting for 61.3% of all plugins. Plugin development is predominantly feature-driven, with feature commits occurring at more than twice the rate of conventional open-source software (OSS) (39.6% vs. 17.2%). Claude co-authors 34.9% of all commits, and four commit types (docs, perf, style, and refactor) carry substantially different meanings in plugin repositories than in traditional software. Most component types evolve independently, but within skills directories, natural-language instruction files and implementation scripts co-evolve at above-chance rates, with 78% of co-changes being functionally coupled, representing a new class of maintenance dependency not observed in traditional software engineering.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in using external tools to solve complex tasks. However, existing evaluations often overlook the temporal dimension of tool use, especially the impact of tool response latency, and are usually limited to single-task settings. In real-world applications, multiple tasks often need to be executed concurrently, and overall efficiency depends on whether an agent can use idle time while waiting for tool responses. We refer to this capability as asynchronous tool calling. To evaluate it, we propose AsyncTool, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based agents in interactive multi-task tool-use environments with delayed tool feedback. AsyncTool presents multiple heterogeneous tasks simultaneously and simulates realistic tool response latency during execution. Using a hybrid data evolution strategy, we construct a diverse asynchronous multitasking dataset that covers multiple scenarios and tool-use patterns. We evaluate models at the step, sub-task, and task levels, and introduce efficiency-oriented metrics to measure task coordination and completion efficiency. Extensive experiments show that delayed tool feedback poses substantial challenges to current agents and leads to clear performance degradation. Models that better coordinate task switching, dependency tracking, and state maintenance achieve stronger performance on AsyncTool. Our analysis identifies key failure modes of current tool-using agents and provides practical insights for designing future systems with stronger temporal reasoning and coordination capabilities.

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 18 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. In general, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

The capabilities of an LLM agent depend not only on its model but on the harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies results, and recovers from failure. Recent work shows that evolving the harness yields persistent improvements without updating model weights. Existing approaches, however, assume that all execution experience can be routed to a single optimizer, which evolves one harness along a sequential trajectory. Real agent ecosystems violate that assumption: users, organizations, and environments generate isolated streams of experience that cannot be pooled, so the experience most worth learning from is exactly the experience that cannot be directly centralized. We introduce EvolveNet, a paradigm of collaborative harness evolution that moves experience extraction to the data. A shared harness is broadcast to data-local agent deployments, each of which evolves it on its own workload. Only the resulting program adaptations are composed into an updated shared harness and redistributed, so that every participating agent inherits operational experience discovered by the others. By shifting the aggregation boundary from raw workloads to learned adaptations, EvolveNet keeps workloads local and allows multiple evolutionary searches to proceed concurrently with reduced serial depth. Because independently modified programs cannot be averaged like model parameters and may conflict when composed, EvolveNet introduces scope-typed, evidence-guided program aggregation. Across five settings spanning text-to-SQL, data-science coding, competitive programming, software engineering, and agentic workflows, EvolveNet improves the shared harness in all five, with the largest gains under heterogeneous workloads, and ablations attribute the improvement to composition of adaptations from different agents rather than to selecting among them.

Combinatorial and optimization problems are fundamental to many industrial AI applications. Solving large-scale real-world instances of such problems typically requires careful problem formalization, specialized solvers, and expert-designed heuristics. Thus, experts need to specify not only what solutions are, but also how they are derived. By introducing the tool CHECKMATE, we show that algorithm generation via code evolution represents a paradigm shift by eliminating the need to formulate the how. CHECKMATE solely relies on the what. Specifically, a formal specification ensures solutions' correctness and enables systematic performance evaluation of the generated programs, while a natural language description guides the evolutionary process. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on selected problems from two industrial domains: configuration and scheduling. In all cases, the evolved algorithms consistently outperform state-of-the-art solvers. This underscores the potential of formal methods in guiding code evolution for automatically solving complex real-world problems.

Traditional methods for automating recommender system design, such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are often constrained by a fixed search space defined by human priors, limiting innovation to pre-defined operators. While recent LLM-driven code evolution frameworks shift fixed search space target to open-ended program spaces, they primarily rely on scalar metrics (e.g., NDCG, Hit Ratio) that fail to provide qualitative insights into model failures or directional guidance for improvement. To address this, we propose Self-EvolveRec, a novel framework that establishes a directional feedback loop by integrating a User Simulator for qualitative critiques and a Model Diagnosis Tool for quantitative internal verification. Furthermore, we introduce a Diagnosis Tool - Model Co-Evolution strategy to ensure that evaluation criteria dynamically adapt as the recommendation architecture evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-EvolveRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NAS and LLM-driven code evolution baselines in both recommendation performance and user satisfaction. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/self_evolverec.

Recently, tool learning with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to tackle highly complex problems. Despite growing attention and rapid advancements in this field, the existing literature remains fragmented and lacks systematic organization, posing barriers to entry for newcomers. This gap motivates us to conduct a comprehensive survey of existing works on tool learning with LLMs. In this survey, we focus on reviewing existing literature from the two primary aspects (1) why tool learning is beneficial and (2) how tool learning is implemented, enabling a comprehensive understanding of tool learning with LLMs. We first explore the "why" by reviewing both the benefits of tool integration and the inherent benefits of the tool learning paradigm from six specific aspects. In terms of "how", we systematically review the literature according to a taxonomy of four key stages in the tool learning workflow: task planning, tool selection, tool calling, and response generation. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, categorizing them according to their relevance to different stages. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outline potential future directions, aiming to inspire both researchers and industrial developers to further explore this emerging and promising area. We also maintain a GitHub repository to continually keep track of the relevant papers and resources in this rising area at https://github.com/quchangle1/LLM-Tool-Survey.

We introduce EvoGit, a decentralized multi-agent framework for collaborative software development driven by autonomous code evolution. EvoGit deploys a population of independent coding agents, each proposing edits to a shared codebase without centralized coordination, explicit message passing, or shared memory. Instead, all coordination emerges through a Git-based phylogenetic graph that tracks the full version lineage and enables agents to asynchronously read from and write to the evolving code repository. This graph-based structure supports fine-grained branching, implicit concurrency, and scalable agent interaction while preserving a consistent historical record. Human involvement is minimal but strategic: users define high-level goals, periodically review the graph, and provide lightweight feedback to promote promising directions or prune unproductive ones. Experiments demonstrate EvoGit's ability to autonomously produce functional and modular software artifacts across two real-world tasks: (1) building a web application from scratch using modern frameworks, and (2) constructing a meta-level system that evolves its own language-model-guided solver for the bin-packing optimization problem. Our results underscore EvoGit's potential to establish a new paradigm for decentralized, automated, and continual software development. EvoGit is open-sourced at https://github.com/BillHuang2001/evogit.

Recent efforts to scale tool-use post-training have largely centered on the synthesis of executable environments, which constitute only one component of a broader agentic interaction system comprising the environment, task, agent harness, and evaluator. Scaling environments in isolation, however, does not guarantee commensurate gains in model performance, because reliable learning signals depend on coherent interactions among all components of the agentic interaction system. To address this problem, we introduce WEFT (Whole-system Evolution For Tool-use Post-training), which couples scalable agentic interaction system construction, execution-driven self-evolution, and stable post-training. WEFT scales agentic interaction system construction across environment breadth, task complexity, and interaction diversity. Execution-driven self-evolution iteratively uses execution traces and state evidence to attribute failures and revise the responsible components, with fresh rollouts evaluating the changes and providing evidence for subsequent evolution rounds. For stable post-training at scale, WEFT addresses both optimization and execution reliability: prefix-preserving sampling retains verified progress and atomic-turn credit assignment localizes learning signals, while MegaMCP maintains isolated, recoverable state across concurrent rollouts over shared tool services. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of WEFT for tool-use post-training. WEFT-8B and WEFT-14B outperform all evaluated matched-size environment-scaling baselines on BFCL V4, τ^2-Bench, and Claw-Eval. In particular, WEFT-14B improves over Agent-World-14B by 6.41, 2.23, and 12.27 percentage points. WEFT-35B-A3B further extends these gains to more challenging long-horizon workflow benchmarks, including Toolathlon-Verified and AutomationBench.

Tool learning aims to enhance and expand large language models' (LLMs) capabilities with external tools, which has gained significant attention recently. Current methods have shown that LLMs can effectively handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of tools is typically extensive and irregularly updated, emphasizing the necessity for a dedicated tool retrieval component. Tool retrieval is nontrivial due to the following challenges: 1) complex user instructions and tool descriptions; 2) misalignment between tool retrieval and tool usage models. To address the above issues, we propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model. Specifically, we prompt the tool usage model, i.e., the LLM, to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round, which could progressively improve the tool retriever's understanding of instructions and tools and reduce the gap between the two standalone components. We build a unified and comprehensive benchmark to evaluate tool retrieval models. The extensive experiments indicate that our proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain evaluation.

Existing benchmarks for AI coding agents focus on isolated, single-issue tasks such as fixing a bug or implementing a small feature. However, real-world software engineering is fundamentally a long-horizon endeavor: developers must interpret high-level requirements, plan coordinated changes across many files, and evolve codebases over multiple iterations while preserving existing functionality. We introduce SWE-EVO, a benchmark that evaluates agents on this long-horizon software evolution challenge. Constructed from release notes and version histories of seven mature open-source Python projects, Tool comprises 48 evolution tasks that require agents to implement multi-step modifications spanning an average of 21 files, validated against comprehensive test suites averaging 874 tests per instance. Experiments with state-of-the-art models reveal a striking capability gap: even GPT-5 with OpenHands achieves only a 21 percent resolution rate on Tool, compared to 65 percent on the single-issue SWE-Bench Verified. This demonstrates that current agents struggle with sustained, multi-file reasoning. We also propose Fix Rate, a fine-grained metric that captures partial progress toward solving these complex, long-horizon tasks.

Software languages evolve over time for various reasons, such as the addition of new features. When the language's grammar definition evolves, textual instances that originally conformed to the grammar become outdated. For DSLs in a model-driven engineering context, there exists a plethora of techniques to co-evolve models with the evolving metamodel. However, these techniques are not geared to support DSLs with a textual syntax -- applying them to textual language definitions and instances may lead to the loss of information from the original instances, such as comments and layout information, which are valuable for software comprehension and maintenance. This study explores the potential of Large Language Model (LLM)-based solutions in achieving grammar and instance co-evolution, with attention to their ability to preserve auxiliary information when directly processing textual instances. By applying two advanced language models, Claude-3.5 and GPT-4o, and conducting experiments across seven case languages, we evaluated the feasibility and limitations of this approach. Our results indicate a good ability of the considered LLMs for migrating textual instances in small-scale cases with limited instance size, which are representative of a subset of cases encountered in practice. In addition, we observe significant challenges with the scalability of LLM-based solutions to larger instances, leading to insights that are useful for informing future research.

Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address. A tool is a single, self-contained function, whereas a skill is a structured bundle of interdependent multi-file artifacts. Currently, skill generation is not only label-intensive due to manual authoring, but also may suffer from human--machine cognitive misalignment, which can lead to degraded agent performance, as evidenced by evaluations on SkillsBench. Therefore, we aim to enable agents to autonomously generate skills. However, existing self-evolving methods designed for tools cannot be directly applied to skills due to their increased complexity. To address these issues, we propose EvoSkills, a self-evolving skills framework that enables agents to autonomously construct complex, multi-file skill packages. Specifically, EvoSkills couples a Skill Generator that iteratively refines skills with a Surrogate Verifier that co-evolves to provide informative and actionable feedback without access to ground-truth test content. On SkillsBench, EvoSkills achieves the highest pass rate among five baselines on both Claude Code and Codex, and also exhibits strong generalization capabilities to six additional LLMs.

Recent advancements in tool-equipped Agents (LLMs) have enabled complex tasks like secure database interactions and multi-agent code development. However, scaling tool capacity beyond agent reasoning or model limits remains a challenge. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Toolshed Knowledge Bases, a tool knowledge base (vector database) designed to store enhanced tool representations and optimize tool selection for large-scale tool-equipped Agents. Additionally, we propose Advanced RAG-Tool Fusion, a novel ensemble of tool-applied advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques across the pre-retrieval, intra-retrieval, and post-retrieval phases, without requiring model fine-tuning. During pre-retrieval, tool documents are enhanced with key information and stored in the Toolshed Knowledge Base. Intra-retrieval focuses on query planning and transformation to increase retrieval accuracy. Post-retrieval refines the retrieved tool documents and enables self-reflection. Furthermore, by varying both the total number of tools (tool-M) an Agent has access to and the tool selection threshold (top-k), we address trade-offs between retrieval accuracy, agent performance, and token cost. Our approach achieves 46%, 56%, and 47% absolute improvements on the ToolE single-tool, ToolE multi-tool and Seal-Tools benchmark datasets, respectively (Recall@5).

LLMs have evolved from language generators to autonomous agents capable of complex, long-horizon tasks. This evolution has produced paradigms including Prompt Engineering to elicit model capabilities, Context Engineering to manage information access, Harness Engineering to organize external tools and resources, and Loop Engineering to support continual reflection and self-improvement. Yet as tasks grow more complex, individual intelligence faces a fundamental limit: many tasks require heterogeneous expertise, interdependent subtasks, parallel execution, independent verification, and persistent state, exceeding any single agent's organizational capacity. Augmenting one agent's capabilities or context cannot resolve this architectural mismatch; intelligence must instead be distributed across specialized agents and organized at the system level. We call this System Intelligence: an agent system's ability to organize and coordinate multiple intelligent components into a coherent, adaptive whole pursuing a shared objective. Achieving it requires more than adding agents; it demands explicit structures to organize work, coordinate heterogeneous agents, and maintain evolving execution states. We introduce Graph Engineering, an emerging paradigm for next-generation agent systems. Unlike prior paradigms that mainly optimize individual interactions or agent-level behavior, Graph Engineering constructs explicit, dynamic, evolving graph structures representing tasks, agents, and system states. These abstractions provide a unified foundation for organizing complex objectives, orchestrating heterogeneous agents, modeling system dynamics, and enabling scalable agent evolution. We systematically review the principles, methodologies, and applications of Graph Engineering for LLM agents. Related papers, open-source data, and projects are collected at https://github.com/DEEP-JLU/Awesome-Graph-Engineering.

Video temporal grounding aims to localize events in videos from natural-language queries. For agents built around frozen video-language models, the harness determines how queries guide temporal predictions and how those predictions are refined. Manually refining these harnesses requires diagnosing grounding failures and coordinating changes to both agent workflows and instructions. We introduce VideoEvolve, a framework that automatically evolves agent harnesses for video temporal grounding. VideoEvolve uses a Cloze-Structured Harness Representation that preserves stage interfaces while leaving agent workflows and instructions open to evolution. Branch-Guided Harness Evolution preserves promising code branches for continued refinement, using execution feedback to guide local edits and validation to determine which improvements are carried forward. Experiments demonstrate improved grounding performance across multiple benchmarks. Component analyses identify instruction refinement as a consistent source of gains, while the benefits of evolved code vary across evaluation settings. Together, these results support automated harness evolution as an effective approach to improving video temporal grounding. Code is available at https://github.com/bingjunluo/VideoEvolve .

As Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers emerge as the core infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, existing benchmarks leverage real-world MCP servers to evaluate LLM agents' tool-using capabilities. However, these benchmarks overlook the continuous evolution of tool interfaces and functionalities within MCP servers, resulting in flawed assessments that fail to capture the agent's adaptability in changing tool landscapes. To bridge this gap, we introduce MCPEvol-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating the task-solving capabilities of LLM agents under dynamic toolset evolution. Inspired by large-scale empirical study, we propose 11 mutation operators to simulate realistic tool evolution within 123 MCP servers. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs on multiple versions of MCP servers, revealing that even frontier models struggle to adapt to evolving tools. For instance, GPT-5.4 and Claude-Sonnet-4-6 exhibit performance declines of 13.7\% and 14.4\% in evolved MCP servers, respectively, accompanied by substantial increases in planning and reasoning errors. These findings highlight the vulnerability of LLM-driven workflows, establishing MCPEvol-Bench as a standard for evaluating agent adaptability in dynamic tool environments.

Cutting-edge agentic AI systems are built on foundation models that can be adapted to plan, reason, and interact with external tools to perform increasingly complex and specialized tasks. As these systems grow in capability and scope, adaptation becomes a central mechanism for improving performance, reliability, and generalization. In this paper, we unify the rapidly expanding research landscape into a systematic framework that spans both agent adaptations and tool adaptations. We further decompose these into tool-execution-signaled and agent-output-signaled forms of agent adaptation, as well as agent-agnostic and agent-supervised forms of tool adaptation. We demonstrate that this framework helps clarify the design space of adaptation strategies in agentic AI, makes their trade-offs explicit, and provides practical guidance for selecting or switching among strategies during system design. We then review the representative approaches in each category, analyze their strengths and limitations, and highlight key open challenges and future opportunities. Overall, this paper aims to offer a conceptual foundation and practical roadmap for researchers and practitioners seeking to build more capable, efficient, and reliable agentic AI systems.

Tool calling has greatly expanded the practical utility of large language models (LLMs) by enabling them to interact with external applications. As LLM capabilities advance, effective tool use increasingly involves multi-step, multi-turn interactions to solve complex tasks. However, the resulting growth in tool interactions incurs substantial latency, posing a key challenge for real-time LLM serving. Through empirical analysis, we find that tool-calling traces are highly structured, conform to constrained schemas, and often exhibit recurring invocation patterns. Motivated by this, we propose ToolSpec, a schema-aware, retrieval-augmented speculative decoding method for accelerating tool calling. ToolSpec exploits predefined tool schemas to generate accurate drafts, using a finite-state machine to alternate between deterministic schema token filling and speculative generation for variable fields. In addition, ToolSpec retrieves similar historical tool invocations and reuses them as drafts to further improve efficiency. ToolSpec presents a plug-and-play solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing LLM workflows. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ToolSpec achieves up to a 4.2x speedup, substantially outperforming existing training-free speculative decoding methods.

This paper presents a new tool learning dataset Seal-Tools, which contains self-instruct API-like tools. Seal-Tools not only offers a large number of tools, but also includes instances which demonstrate the practical application of tools. Seeking to generate data on a large scale while ensuring reliability, we propose a self-instruct method to generate tools and instances, allowing precise control over the process. Moreover, our Seal-Tools contains hard instances that call multiple tools to complete the job, among which some are nested tool callings. For precise and comprehensive evaluation, we use strict format control and design three metrics from different dimensions. Therefore, Seal-Tools can serve as a new benchmark to evaluate the tool-calling ability of LLMs. Finally, we evaluate several prevalent LLMs and our finetuned model on Seal-Tools. The results show that current systems are far from perfect. The code, data and experiment results are available at https://github.com/fairyshine/Seal-Tools .

Language models (LMs) are powerful yet mostly for text generation tasks. Tools have substantially enhanced their performance for tasks that require complex skills. However, many works adopt the term "tool" in different ways, raising the question: What is a tool anyway? Subsequently, where and how do tools help LMs? In this survey, we provide a unified definition of tools as external programs used by LMs, and perform a systematic review of LM tooling scenarios and approaches. Grounded on this review, we empirically study the efficiency of various tooling methods by measuring their required compute and performance gains on various benchmarks, and highlight some challenges and potential future research in the field.

Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. However, three pivotal questions remain unanswered: (1) How effective are current LLMs in utilizing tools? (2) How can we enhance LLMs' ability to utilize tools? (3) What obstacles need to be overcome to leverage tools? To address these questions, we introduce API-Bank, a groundbreaking benchmark, specifically designed for tool-augmented LLMs. For the first question, we develop a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools. We annotate 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls to assess the existing LLMs' capabilities in planning, retrieving, and calling APIs. For the second question, we construct a comprehensive training set containing 1,888 tool-use dialogues from 2,138 APIs spanning 1,000 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we train Lynx, a tool-augmented LLM initialized from Alpaca. Experimental results demonstrate that GPT-3.5 exhibits improved tool utilization compared to GPT-3, while GPT-4 excels in planning. However, there is still significant potential for further improvement. Moreover, Lynx surpasses Alpaca's tool utilization performance by more than 26 pts and approaches the effectiveness of GPT-3.5. Through error analysis, we highlight the key challenges for future research in this field to answer the third question.

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for software evolution, yet most interaction paradigms remain code-centric and require manual context management and prompt iteration. We present FeatX, a feature-oriented tool for editing software by editing features. Given an existing repository, FeatX extracts a hierarchical epic-feature structure with explicit feature-to-code mappings, then invokes a three-stage Evolution Agent to translate feature edits into code patches. The workflow is exposed through four coordinated panels. Across a controlled user study and replay experiments on 38 real-world feature-editing commits, FeatX significantly reduces cognitive load and improves usability compared with vanilla ChatGPT. It also achieves a 42.6\% relative improvement in function-level modification localization F1 over strong LLM baselines, at substantially lower cost (\$0.07 in total). The tool and collected dataset are available at https://github.com/a496263365/FeatX/tree/demo, with a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/OZqKZ4Ii-yM.

Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve execution mechanisms from experience. However, generalizable harness RSI remains challenging. First, evolving harnesses on evaluation benchmarks or their subsets makes it difficult to distinguish reusable improvements from benchmark-specific adaptation. Second, single-trajectory updates can conflate systematic harness deficiencies with instance-specific reasoning and solution details, producing modifications that transfer poorly to unseen tasks. Third, localizing recurring behavioral deficiencies within monolithic harnesses is difficult, while whole-harness optimization can entangle unrelated mechanisms and complicate attribution and validation. We propose ModularRSI, a benchmark-disjoint, contrastive, and modular framework for generalizable harness evolution. ModularRSI contrasts successful and failed trajectories for the same task and aggregates evidence across tasks to identify recurring behavioral deficiencies. It decomposes the evolvable harness into five functional modules: Agent Loop, Tool Use, Observation Management, Context Management, and Task Completion Detection. Each module evolves independently within a restricted modification scope, followed by an integration stage that combines the evolved modules into a unified harness and resolves potential conflicts. To support benchmark-disjoint evolution, we curate 2,000 executable evolution tasks from external sources that are disjoint from downstream evaluation benchmarks. Experiments on TB2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified show consistent improvements on unseen in-domain and cross-domain tasks, with the evolved harness also transferring across different foundation models.

Recent advances in agentic systems increasingly treat code as an executable operational substrate rather than as a disposable output artifact. Prior work such as Code as Agent Harness frames validated agent-generated artifacts as runtime entities that can be created, executed, revised, persisted, and reused within long-running cognitive loops. However, the governance, lifecycle management, and operational evolution of such artifacts remain under-specified. This paper proposes a framework for governed runtime evolution in multi-agent systems through executable operational cognition. We formalize agent-generated artifacts as persistent runtime capabilities that progressively become part of the operational substrate rather than transient intermediate outputs. Building on this perspective, we introduce HarnessMutation as a governed mechanism for lifecycle-aware runtime adaptation operating under explicit validation, traceability, evaluation, and rollback constraints. Rather than treating runtime adaptation as unrestricted self-modification, the proposed framework models evolution as a bounded and observable process over persistent operational memory. It further shows how these ideas can be operationalized over modern agent runtimes and governance-oriented orchestration systems, providing a conceptual foundation for adaptive infrastructures whose evolution remains explicit, auditable, and constrained.

Recent developments in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for selecting relevant tools from a tool knowledge base enable LLM agents to scale their complex tool calling capabilities to hundreds or thousands of external tools, APIs, or agents-as-tools. However, traditional RAG-based tool retrieval fails to capture structured dependencies between tools, limiting the retrieval accuracy of a retrieved tool's dependencies. For example, among a vector database of tools, a "get stock price" API requires a "stock ticker" parameter from a "get stock ticker" API, and both depend on OS-level internet connectivity tools. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing Graph RAG-Tool Fusion, a novel plug-and-play approach that combines the strengths of vector-based retrieval with efficient graph traversal to capture all relevant tools (nodes) along with any nested dependencies (edges) within the predefined tool knowledge graph. We also present ToolLinkOS, a new tool selection benchmark of 573 fictional tools, spanning over 15 industries, each with an average of 6.3 tool dependencies. We demonstrate that Graph RAG-Tool Fusion achieves absolute improvements of 71.7% and 22.1% over na\"ive RAG on ToolLinkOS and ToolSandbox benchmarks, respectively (mAP@10). ToolLinkOS dataset is available at https://github.com/EliasLumer/Graph-RAG-Tool-Fusion-ToolLinkOS

Most existing embodied intelligence methods formulate perception, reasoning, planning, and control within a unified parameterized policy. Yet these capabilities are inherently hierarchical and heterogeneous, making them difficult to reliably learn and modularize within a single model. We propose a capability externalization approach that decouples heterogeneous capabilities into independently optimized tools, dynamically invoked at inference time. To this end, we introduce Embodied Tool Protocol (ETP), a standardized protocol for embodied tool registration, discovery, invocation, and execution, and curate 100+ validated tools spanning perception, cognition, reasoning, and execution as the tool base. Building on this, we construct EmbodiedToolBench to evaluate both whether tool augmentation improves embodied performance and how well current models use tools across tool-necessity recognition, tool selection, tool execution, and tool-chain composition. Experiments across simulation and real-world platforms confirm that capability externalization consistently improves embodied performance (avg. gain 31% on EB-ALFRED and 36% on EB-Navigation), yet reveal a clear boundary: gains are substantial for cognition and perception but are limited for execution-type capabilities. Moreover, our analysis reveals that knowing when, which, and how to invoke tools remains a persistent challenge across all models, thereby highlighting embodied tool competence as a critical direction for future research.

Developers increasingly use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude in everyday software workflows, but prior studies often evaluate LLM outputs in isolation rather than examining how developers adapt them in real projects. We analyze 35,361 GitHub code comments that explicitly reference AI use and their associated code blocks. We first open-code 500 unique comments and code blocks to derive a taxonomy of AI-assisted development activities, then annotate the full dataset using two LLM-based classifiers and aggregate predictions with Dawid-Skene expectation-maximization. We also analyze 12,996 subsequent commit messages to study how AI-assisted code evolves after introduction, and examine temporal trends from December 2022 to March 2026. Our results show that developers primarily use LLMs for code implementation, followed by code enhancement, debugging, documentation, and testing. Subsequent commits frequently involve refactoring and cleanup, feature integration and extension, and bug fixing, indicating sustained human oversight in adapting AI-assisted code. Over time, AI-referencing comments shift from direct code generation toward knowledge and conceptual support and code enhancement. These findings suggest that AI tools are becoming embedded not only as code-generation aids, but also as collaborative support mechanisms whose outputs are refined, extended, and corrected by developers over time.

Recent advancements in tool-augmented large language models have enabled them to interact with external tools, enhancing their ability to perform complex user tasks. However, existing approaches overlook the role of personalisation in guiding tool use. This work investigates how user preferences can be effectively integrated into goal-oriented dialogue agents. Through extensive analysis, we identify key weaknesses in the ability of LLMs to personalise tool use. To this end, we introduce TAPS, a novel solution that enhances personalised tool use by leveraging a structured tagging tool and an uncertainty-based tool detector. TAPS significantly improves the ability of LLMs to incorporate user preferences, achieving the new state-of-the-art for open source models on the NLSI task.

Under model--harness co-evolution, harnesses are not merely inference-time scaffolds but data-generating components whose execution traces can shape future foundation models. This motivates harness-in-the-loop learning: optimizing harnesses for both immediate agent performance and the quality of traces used for future model training. However, continually updating provider-built scaffolds is costly and labor-intensive. We therefore investigate whether optimizing user-constructed harnesses in a task-specific manner can improve execution-trace quality while remaining computationally lightweight and requiring only a few update iterations. To this end, we introduce Recursive Harness Self-Improvement (RHI), which represents the harness as a prompt-level specification of the agent loop and iteratively refines it using pairwise feedback over its own revision history. Across 30 synthetic machine-learning research tasks spanning quantitative finance, robotics, and pharmacy, a few RHI iterations suffice to substantially raise the performance ceiling of low-reasoning-effort agents, exceeding the corresponding maximum-reasoning-effort setting while reducing inference cost by up to 60%. We show that these gains arise primarily from improved task-specific context management through more effective inter-agent information flow rather than longer reasoning traces. Finally, we formalize this behavior as an information-theoretic hypothesis for RHI's implicit optimization objective, suggesting RHI as a practical algorithm for continual learning within the paradigm of model--harness co-evolution.

Recent releases such as o3 highlight human-like "thinking with images" reasoning that combines structured tool use with stepwise verification, yet most open-source approaches still rely on text-only chains, rigid visual schemas, or single-step pipelines, limiting flexibility, interpretability, and transferability on complex tasks. We introduce CodeDance, which explores executable code as a general solver for visual reasoning. Unlike fixed-schema calls (e.g., only predicting bounding-box coordinates), CodeDance defines, composes, and executes code to orchestrate multiple tools, compute intermediate results, and render visual artifacts (e.g., boxes, lines, plots) that support transparent, self-checkable reasoning. To guide this process, we introduce a reward for balanced and adaptive tool-call, which balances exploration with efficiency and mitigates tool overuse. Interestingly, beyond the expected capabilities taught by atomic supervision, we empirically observe novel emergent behaviors during RL training: CodeDance demonstrates novel tool invocations, unseen compositions, and cross-task transfer. These behaviors arise without task-specific fine-tuning, suggesting a general and scalable mechanism of executable visual reasoning. Extensive experiments across reasoning benchmarks (e.g., visual search, math, chart QA) show that CodeDance not only consistently outperforms schema-driven and text-only baselines, but also surpasses advanced closed models such as GPT-4o and larger open-source models.

The prevailing approach to computer-use agents couples a model with a domain-specific harness: a browser or desktop environment equipped with human engineered tools that are fixed before task execution. As models' coding capabilities improve, the GUI native and static harness prevents them from direct programmatic operation on system state, as well as flexible construction of tools. To this end, we introduce CUAWright, a minimal terminal harness of roughly 3K lines of code that uses bash commands as its sole action interface, and a file system as its evolvable space for dynamically creating tools and managing the context. We conduct comprehensive experiments across a wide range of digital tasks, and demonstrate that by giving the agent a minimal, programmable interface, it achieves substantially stronger results compared to their GUI or hybrid CLI interface across a wide range of tasks. On OSWorld 2.0, CUAWright delivers a 33.2% relative improvement in partial reward while reducing estimated cost by 37.5% compared with the published GPT-5.5 baseline. On Online-Mind2Web and the long horizon Odysseys benchmark, CUAWright substantially outperforms GUI native harness by 4.7% and 44.0% in success rate, respectively. Furthermore, we found the gains extend to CAD applications that require accurate visual understanding and CLI interaction: on CADGenBench and BenchCAD, our unified harness yields 8.1%-41.6% relative improvements over other CLI based harnesses with GPT-5.5. Together, these results suggest digital environments are far more programmable than their GUI interfaces imply, and a minimal terminal-focused harness is the key for better performance and efficiency.

Large language models are increasingly capable of synthesizing executable frontend projects, yet existing benchmarks still treat web generation as a static evaluation problem. We argue that frontend artifacts demand a different paradigm: they are interactive rather than static, admit diverse yet equally valid implementations, and evolve faster than rigid pipelines can accommodate. To address these gaps, we present LiveEvalBench, an automated framework that reformulates web-generation evaluation as an agentic, adaptive, and extensible process. LiveEvalBench instantiates evaluation as a collaborative review workflow, in which a Build Engineer, a Code Engineer, and a UI Tester collectively gather evidence across the full lifecycle of a frontend project, from deployment and code inspection to browser-based interaction. To handle implementation diversity, an adaptive protocol couples shared rubrics for cross-model comparability with implementation-grounded criteria tailored to each artifact. The framework further supports incremental integration of new evaluator roles and assessment dimensions without pipeline redesign. Experiments across diverse real-world web-generation scenarios show that LiveEvalBench aligns closely with human expert judgment and provides fine-grained insights into frontier models' web generation capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/wyysteelhead/LiveEvalBench

Tool learning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external environments by invoking tools, serving as an effective strategy to mitigate the limitations inherent in their pre-training data. In this process, tool documentation plays a crucial role by providing usage instructions for LLMs, thereby facilitating effective tool utilization. This paper concentrates on the critical challenge of bridging the comprehension gap between LLMs and external tools due to the inadequacies and inaccuracies inherent in existing human-centric tool documentation. We propose a novel framework, DRAFT, aimed at Dynamically Refining tool documentation through the Analysis of Feedback and Trails emanating from LLMs' interactions with external tools. This methodology pivots on an innovative trial-and-error approach, consisting of three distinct learning phases: experience gathering, learning from experience, and documentation rewriting, to iteratively enhance the tool documentation. This process is further optimized by implementing a diversity-promoting exploration strategy to ensure explorative diversity and a tool-adaptive termination mechanism to prevent overfitting while enhancing efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that DRAFT's iterative, feedback-based refinement significantly ameliorates documentation quality, fostering a deeper comprehension and more effective utilization of tools by LLMs. Notably, our analysis reveals that the tool documentation refined via our approach demonstrates robust cross-model generalization capabilities.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools has enabled them to tackle an increasingly diverse range of tasks. However, as the tasks become more complex and long-horizon, the intricate tool utilization process may trigger various unexpected errors. Therefore, how to effectively handle such errors, including identifying, diagnosing, and recovering from them, has emerged as a key research direction for advancing tool learning. In this work, we first extensively analyze the types of errors encountered during the function-calling process on several competitive tool evaluation benchmarks. Based on it, we introduce CRITICTOOL, a comprehensive critique evaluation benchmark specialized for tool learning. Building upon a novel evolutionary strategy for dataset construction, CRITICTOOL holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on CRITICTOOL, and validate the generalization and effectiveness of our constructed benchmark strategy. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the tool reflection ability on various LLMs, offering a new perspective on the field of tool learning in LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}.

Agent evolvers automate the design of the prompts, skills and workflows around language model agents, yet the optimization process they follow is still designed by hand: a fixed search loop decides how candidates are evaluated, which are kept and when the search stops. We propose FREEEVOLVE, which automates this process as well. An environment specifies the goal, target agent, evaluator, data and resource limits; within these limits, the evolver itself decides what to test, how much evidence to collect, which candidates to pursue and when to stop. These decisions follow an editable evolution skill, which we improve through meta-evolution by scoring each candidate skill on the fresh target agent it produces. The optimization process thus becomes a capability learned from experience rather than a loop engineered in advance. On tau3-bench, ARC-AGI-2, ARC-AGI-3 and Terminal-Bench 2.1, FREEEVOLVE controls the evolution campaign by itself, yet improves the primary held-out metric by 13.6 points on average and matches or exceeds hand-designed evolvers. The learned process keeps improving with experience: meta-evolved skills add 6.9 points over the seed skill on fresh target agents, demonstrating transferability across environments.

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.

Agentic AI systems represent a new frontier in artificial intelligence, where agents often based on large language models(LLMs) interact with tools, environments, and other agents to accomplish tasks with a degree of autonomy. These systems show promise across a range of domains, but their architectural underpinnings remain immature. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of the types of agents, their modes of interaction with the environment, and the infrastructural and architectural challenges that emerge. We identify a gap in how these systems manage tool orchestration at scale and propose a reusable design abstraction: the "Control Plane as a Tool" pattern. This pattern allows developers to expose a single tool interface to an agent while encapsulating modular tool routing logic behind it. We position this pattern within the broader context of agent design and argue that it addresses several key challenges in scaling, safety, and extensibility.

Auto-harness systems such as A-Evolve, GEPA, and Meta-Harness improve LLM agents by optimizing prompts, skills, tools, memories, and supporting infrastructure from execution feedback, but they are typically evaluated on fixed offline benchmarks. Real deployments instead present open-ended task streams: histories grow without a fixed endpoint, heterogeneous tasks require different harnesses, and problem distributions shift over time. These challenges make a single repeatedly and densely updated harness brittle, causing performance degradation as accuracy peaks early and then declines. This motivates sustained harness construction with task-wise adaptation. We introduce Adaptive Auto-Harness, a framework and system for such streams. The framework decomposes the gap to an oracle harness into evolution loss and adaptation loss. The system addresses these losses with a stateful multi-agent evolver, a harness tree with solve-time routing, and human-steering hooks for cases where history lacks the needed signal. Across prediction-market, security-competition, and event-forecasting streams, Adaptive Auto-Harness outperforms five existing auto-harness baselines and ablations attribute gains to better construction, routing, or targeted human steering. Code is available in https://github.com/A-EVO-Lab/AdaptiveHarness .

Long-running coding agents such as autoresearch can persistently discover optimizations for open-ended problems. However, they tend to converge onto a single high-level approach, then proceed with low-level edits while missing other superior approaches to the problem. We hypothesize two harness-level design choices contribute to this behavior: accumulating context in a single long-running agent and only exposing a single program state to edit. We introduce SwarmResearch, an orchestrator-subagent harness in which a Shepherd Agent uses global context to steer a population of Search Agents, each operating with local context in their respective git branch. On open-ended optimization tasks, SwarmResearch discovers better or comparable solutions to state-of-the-art LLM-guided evolution and multi-agent techniques on 13/15 tasks, driven by higher-level exploration. Compared with fixed scaling of serial and parallel agents, SwarmResearch's orchestrator-guided scaling discovers better-performing solutions by adapting parallelism at different search depths.

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging due to delayed supervision and the difficulty of credit assignment in long-horizon trajectories. Existing optimization approaches tend to be either monolithic, which are prone to entangling behaviors, or single-aspect, which ignore cross-module error propagation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoTool, a self-evolving framework that optimizes a modular tool-use policy via a gradient-free evolutionary paradigm. EvoTool decomposes agent's tool-use policy into four modules, including Planner, Selector, Caller, and Synthesizer, and iteratively improves them in a self-improving loop through three novel mechanisms. Trajectory-Grounded Blame Attribution uses diagnostic traces to localize failures to a specific module. Feedback-Guided Targeted Mutation then edits only that module via natural-language critique. Diversity-Aware Population Selection preserves complementary candidates to ensure solution diversity. Across four benchmarks, EvoTool outperforms strong baselines by over 5 points on both GPT-4.1 and Qwen3-8B, while achieving superior efficiency and transferability. The code will be released once paper is accepted.

Large language models are increasingly embedded in software engineering workflows as coding agents that can inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute tests, debug failures, and generate patches. Yet most existing agents remain largely static after deployment, even though software development is a dynamic, feedback-rich process in which repositories evolve, dependencies change, tests fail, and repair attempts leave reusable experience. This tension has motivated a growing body of work on self-evolving coding agents, where the agent improves its future behavior by updating its framework, memory, skills, tools, models, or collaboration structures from prior coding interactions. In this survey, we provide a systematic synthesis of this emerging area. We first define self-evolving coding agents and distinguish them from conventional coding agents and general self-evolving agents. We then develop an object-centered taxonomy that characterizes what evolves in these systems, and complement it with two orthogonal perspectives: when evolution occurs and what software-specific evidence drives it. Across the literature, we find that executable feedback, repository-level context, and coding trajectories give software engineering a distinctive role as a natural domain for agent self-evolution, but also introduce new challenges in feedback reliability, benchmark overfitting, safety, maintainability, cost, and generalization. By organizing existing work around these dimensions, this survey aims to clarify the conceptual boundaries of self-evolving coding agents and provide a foundation for designing more adaptive, reliable, and software-aware agentic systems. The papers we collect can be found at https://github.com/zhouhao1024/Awesome-Self-Evolving-Coding-Agents.

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with external tools have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving complex real-world tasks. However, existing approaches suffer from two key challenges: brittle multi-step and multi-turn reasoning caused by incompatible tool output types and API schemas, and performance degradation under large tool catalogues. To address these, we introduce Tool Primitives, a design that replaces rigid API schema-based invocation with natural language as the interface for tool calling, where each tool is wrapped with an LLM interface that handles schema resolution and execution internally, enabling natural inter-tool communication for nested and multi-turn tool calling. Building on Tool Primitives, we host ToolFace, a centralized repository of 25,519 functions from which LLMs dynamically retrieve only the relevant tools at inference time, eliminating the need to enumerate raw API schemas in context. To orchestrate Tool Primitives and ToolFace reliably in complex settings, we further propose HEART, a Harness Engineering framework via Agent-native, Reusable Tool Primitives, comprising a Planner, Router, and Verifier that jointly support dynamic tool invocation planning, multi-step execution, and feedback-driven recovery. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that HEART outperforms SFT-based models by 10% on average and surpasses GPT-5.4, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, and Gemini-3.1-Pro by 6% on average while reducing API cost by up to 85%. On 50 real-world tasks, HEART achieves 84% task completion, 3.8times the average of three frontier commercial models (22%).

Numerous efforts have been invested in improving the effectiveness of bug localization techniques, whereas little attention is paid to making these tools run more efficiently in continuously evolving software repositories. This paper first analyzes the information retrieval model behind a classic bug localization tool, BugLocator, and builds a mathematical foundation illustrating that the model can be updated incrementally when codebase or bug reports evolve. Then, we present IncBL, a tool for Incremental Bug Localization in evolving software repositories. IncBL is evaluated on the Bugzbook dataset, and the results show that IncBL can significantly reduce the running time by 77.79% on average compared with the re-computing the model, while maintaining the same level of accuracy. We also implement IncBL as a Github App that can be easily integrated into open-source projects on GitHub. Users can deploy and use IncBL locally as well. The demo video for IncBL can be viewed at https://youtu.be/G4gMuvlJSb0, and the source code can be found at https://github.com/soarsmu/IncBL.

As the typical retraining paradigm is unacceptably time- and resource-consuming, researchers are turning to model editing to find an effective way that supports both consecutive and batch scenarios to edit the model behavior directly. Despite all these practical expectations, existing model editing methods fail to realize all of them. Furthermore, the memory demands for such sequential model editing approaches tend to be prohibitive, frequently necessitating an external memory that grows incrementally over time. To cope with these challenges, we propose CoachHooK, a model editing method that simultaneously supports sequential and batch editing. CoachHooK is memory-friendly as it only needs a small amount of it to store several hook layers whose size remains unchanged over time. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other batch-supportive model editing methods under both single-round and consecutive batch editing scenarios. Extensive analyses of CoachHooK have been conducted to verify the stability of our method over a number of consecutive steps.

Existing evaluations of tool learning primarily focus on validating the alignment of selected tools for large language models (LLMs) with expected outcomes. However, these approaches rely on a limited set of scenarios where answers can be pre-determined, diverging from genuine needs. Furthermore, a sole emphasis on outcomes disregards the intricate capabilities essential for LLMs to effectively utilize tools. To tackle this issue, we propose ToolEyes, a fine-grained system tailored for the evaluation of the LLMs' tool learning capabilities in authentic scenarios. The system meticulously examines seven real-world scenarios, analyzing five dimensions crucial to LLMs in tool learning: format alignment, intent comprehension, behavior planning, tool selection, and answer organization. Additionally, ToolEyes incorporates a tool library boasting approximately 600 tools, serving as an intermediary between LLMs and the physical world. Evaluations involving ten LLMs across three categories reveal a preference for specific scenarios and limited cognitive abilities in tool learning. Intriguingly, expanding the model size even exacerbates the hindrance to tool learning. These findings offer instructive insights aimed at advancing the field of tool learning. The data is available att https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/ToolEyes.

Recent advancements in code-fluent Large Language Models (LLMs) enabled the research on repository-level code editing. In such tasks, the model navigates and modifies the entire codebase of a project according to request. Hence, such tasks require efficient context retrieval, i.e., navigating vast codebases to gather relevant context. Despite the recognized importance of context retrieval, existing studies tend to approach repository-level coding tasks in an end-to-end manner, rendering the impact of individual components within these complicated systems unclear. In this work, we decouple the task of context retrieval from the other components of the repository-level code editing pipelines. We lay the groundwork to define the strengths and weaknesses of this component and the role that reasoning plays in it by conducting experiments that focus solely on context retrieval. We conclude that while the reasoning helps to improve the precision of the gathered context, it still lacks the ability to identify its sufficiency. We also outline the ultimate role of the specialized tools in the process of context gathering. The code supplementing this paper is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/ai-agents-code-editing.

AI scientists are emerging computational systems that serve as collaborative partners in discovery. These systems remain difficult to build because they are bespoke, tied to rigid workflows, and lack shared environments that unify tools, data, and analyses into a common ecosystem. In omics, unified ecosystems have transformed research by enabling interoperability, reuse, and community-driven development; AI scientists require comparable infrastructure. We present ToolUniverse, an ecosystem for building AI scientists from any language or reasoning model, whether open or closed. TOOLUNIVERSE standardizes how AI scientists identify and call tools, integrating more than 600 machine learning models, datasets, APIs, and scientific packages for data analysis, knowledge retrieval, and experimental design. It automatically refines tool interfaces for correct use by AI scientists, creates new tools from natural language descriptions, iteratively optimizes tool specifications, and composes tools into agentic workflows. In a case study of hypercholesterolemia, ToolUniverse was used to create an AI scientist to identify a potent analog of a drug with favorable predicted properties. The open-source ToolUniverse is available at https://aiscientist.tools.

The rise of capabilities expressed by large language models has been quickly followed by the integration of the same complex systems into application level logic. Algorithms, programs, systems, and companies are built around structured prompting to black box models where the majority of the design and implementation lies in capturing and quantifying the `agent mode'. The standard way to shape a closed language model is to prime it for a specific task with a tailored prompt, often initially handwritten by a human. The textual prompts co-evolve with the codebase, taking shape over the course of project life as artifacts which must be reviewed and maintained, just as the traditional code files might be. Unlike traditional code, we find that prompts do not receive effective static testing and linting to prevent runtime issues. In this work, we present a novel dataset called PromptSet, with more than 61,000 unique developer prompts used in open source Python programs. We perform analysis on this dataset and introduce the notion of a static linter for prompts. Released with this publication is a HuggingFace dataset and a Github repository to recreate collection and processing efforts, both under the name pisterlabs/promptset.

In this work, we introduce CodeEvolve, an open-source evolutionary coding agent that unites Large Language Models (LLMs) with genetic algorithms to solve complex computational problems. Our framework adapts powerful evolutionary concepts to the LLM domain, building upon recent methods for generalized scientific discovery. CodeEvolve employs an island-based genetic algorithm to maintain population diversity and increase throughput, introduces a novel inspiration-based crossover mechanism that leverages the LLMs context window to combine features from successful solutions, and implements meta-prompting strategies for dynamic exploration of the solution space. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of CodeEvolve on a subset of the mathematical benchmarks used to evaluate Google DeepMind's closed-source AlphaEvolve. Our findings show that our method surpasses AlphaEvolve's performance on several challenging problems. To foster collaboration and accelerate progress, we release our complete framework as an open-source repository.

Existing research infrastructure is fundamentally document-centric, providing citation links between papers but lacking explicit representations of methodological evolution. In particular, it does not capture the structured relationships that explain how and why research methods emerge, adapt, and build upon one another. With the rise of AI-driven research agents as a new class of consumers of scientific knowledge, this limitation becomes increasingly consequential, as such agents cannot reliably reconstruct method evolution topologies from unstructured text. We introduce Intern-Atlas, a methodological evolution graph that automatically identifies method-level entities, infers lineage relationships among methodologies, and captures the bottlenecks that drive transitions between successive innovations. Built from 1,030,314 papers spanning AI conferences, journals, and arXiv preprints, the resulting graph comprises 9,410,201 semantically typed edges, each grounded in verbatim source evidence, forming a queryable causal network of methodological development. To operationalize this structure, we further propose a self-guided temporal tree search algorithm for constructing evolution chains that trace the progression of methods over time. We evaluate the quality of the resulting graph against expert-curated ground-truth evolution chains and observe strong alignment. In addition, we demonstrate that Intern-Atlas enables downstream applications in idea evaluation and automated idea generation. We position methodological evolution graphs as a foundational data layer for the emerging automated scientific discovery.

Reusing and invoking existing code remains costly and unreliable, as most practical tools are embedded in heterogeneous code repositories and lack standardized, executable interfaces. Although large language models (LLMs) and Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based tool invocation frameworks enable natural language task execution, current approaches rely heavily on manual tool curation and standardization, which fundamentally limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ToolRosetta, a unified framework that automatically translates open-source code repositories and APIs into MCP-compatible tools that can be reliably invoked by LLMs. Given a user task, ToolRosetta autonomously plans toolchains, identifies relevant codebases, and converts them into executable MCP services, enabling end-to-end task completion with minimal human intervention. In addition, ToolRosetta incorporates a security inspection layer to mitigate risks inherent in executing arbitrary code. Extensive experiments across diverse scientific domains demonstrate that ToolRosetta can automatically standardize a large number of open-source tools and reduce the human effort required for code reproduction and deployment. Notably, by seamlessly leveraging specialized open-source tools, ToolRosetta-powered agents consistently improve task completion performance compared to commercial LLMs and existing agent systems.

Recent work pairs LLMs with evolutionary search to iteratively generate, modify, and select code using task-specific feedback. These systems have produced strong results in mathematical discovery and algorithm design, yet a fundamental question remains: what do they actually evolve? Progress is typically summarized by the best score a run reaches under a task-specific evaluator, but that score can reflect several different mechanisms: new algorithmic structure, re-tuning an existing strategy, recombining ideas already in the model's internal knowledge, or overfitting to the evaluator. Distinguishing these mechanisms requires inspecting the search process itself, not only its final outcome. We introduce EvoTrace, a dataset of evolutionary coding traces spanning four evolutionary frameworks, reasoning and non-reasoning models, and 16 tasks across mathematics and algorithm design. To analyze these traces, we develop EvoReplay, a replay-based methodology that reconstructs the local search states behind high-scoring solutions and tests controlled interventions, including adjusting constants, removing program components and substituting models or prompting contexts. We annotate every code edit in EvoTrace with one of nine recurring edit types using an LLM-as-judge pipeline validated against blind human re-annotation. Across EvoTrace, most score gains come from a small subset of these edit types. We further find a deterministic cycling pattern: about 30% of code lines added during search are byte-identical re-introductions of previously-deleted lines, present throughout nearly every run. These results show that benchmark gains in evolutionary coding agents can arise from qualitatively different mechanisms, only some of which correspond to new algorithmic structure. EvoTrace enables more diagnostic evaluation of evolutionary coding agents beyond final benchmark scores.

Spec-driven development (SDD) with AI coding agents provides a structured workflow, but agents often remain "context blind" in large, evolving repositories, leading to hallucinated APIs and architectural violations. We present Spec Kit Agents, a multi-agent SDD pipeline (with PM and developer roles) that adds phase-level, context-grounding hooks. Read-only probing hooks ground each stage (Specify, Plan, Tasks, Implement) in repository evidence, while validation hooks check intermediate artifacts against the environment. We evaluate 128 runs covering 32 features across five repositories. Context-grounding hooks improve judged quality by +0.15 on a 1-5 composite LLM-as-judge score (+3.0 percent of the full score; Wilcoxon signed-rank, p < 0.05) while maintaining 99.7-100 percent repository-level test compatibility. We further evaluate the framework on SWE-bench Lite, where augmentation hooks improve baseline by 1.7 percent, achieving 58.2 percent Pass@1.

The emergence of Agentic AI systems has outpaced the architectural thinking required to operate them effectively. These agents differ fundamentally from traditional software: their behavior is not fixed at deployment but continuously shaped by experience, feedback, and context. Applying operational principles inherited from DevOps or MLOps, built for deterministic software and traditional ML systems, assumes that system behavior can be managed through versioning, monitoring, and rollback. This assumption breaks down for Agentic AI systems whose learning trajectories diverge over time. This introduces non-determinism making system reliability a challenge at runtime. We argue that architecting such systems requires a shift from managing control loops to enabling dynamic co-evolution among agents, infrastructure, and human oversight. To guide this shift, we introduce CHANGE, a conceptual framework comprising six capabilities for operationalizing Agentic AI systems: Contextualize, Harmonize, Anticipate, Negotiate, Generate, and Evolve. CHANGE provides a foundation for architecting an AgentOps platform to manage the lifecycle of evolving Agentic AI systems, illustrated through a customer-support system scenario. In doing so, CHANGE redefines software architecture for an era where adaptation to uncertainty and continuous evolution are inherent properties of the system.

The performance of LLM-based agents depends not only on the agent itself but also on the quality of the tool interfaces it consumes. While prior work has focused heavily on agent fine-tuning, tool interfaces-including natural language descriptions and parameter schemas-remain largely human-oriented and often become a bottleneck, especially when agents must select from large candidate tool sets. Existing approaches to improving tool interfaces rely on execution traces, which are frequently unavailable in cold-start or privacy-constrained settings, and typically optimize each tool independently, limiting scalability and generalization to unseen tools. We propose Trace-Free+, a curriculum learning framework that progressively transfers supervision from trace-rich settings to trace-free deployment, encouraging the model to abstract reusable interface-usage patterns and tool usage outcomes. To support this approach, we construct a large-scale dataset of high-quality tool interfaces using a structured workflow over a diverse collection of tools. Experiments on StableToolBench and RestBench show consistent gains on unseen tools, strong cross-domain generalization, and robustness as the number of candidate tools scales to over 100, demonstrating that tool interface optimization is a practical and deployable complement to agent fine-tuning.

Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, progress has been hindered by a lack of reliable evaluation datasets. To address this, we present ToolHop, a dataset comprising 995 user queries and 3,912 associated tools, specifically designed for rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. ToolHop ensures diverse queries, meaningful interdependencies, locally executable tools, detailed feedback, and verifiable answers through a novel query-driven data construction approach that includes tool creation, document refinement, and code generation. We evaluate 14 LLMs across five model families (i.e., LLaMA3.1, Qwen2.5, Gemini1.5, Claude3.5, and GPT), uncovering significant challenges in handling multi-hop tool-use scenarios. The leading model, GPT-4o, achieves an accuracy of 49.04%, underscoring substantial room for improvement. Further analysis reveals variations in tool-use strategies for various families, offering actionable insights to guide the development of more effective approaches. Code and data can be found in https://huggingface.co/bytedance-research/ToolHop.

Modern software projects depend on third-party libraries that evolve continuously, introducing breaking API changes that prevent client code from compiling after a dependency update. When the same library update breaks multiple projects, existing repair approaches generate project-specific patches that cannot be reused, requiring each affected project to be repaired independently. We present BigBag, an agentic framework that generates fixing transformations: structured, executable programs that encode the repair logic at the API level and transfer to any client broken by the same update. We evaluate BigBag on 157 compilation failure breaking dependency updates from the BUMP benchmark, across eight configurations combining four large language models and two AST transformation engines (Spoon and JavaParser). The best configuration achieves a compilable transformation rate of 94.3% and a fix rate of 78.6%. Generated transformations transfer across projects, achieving a cross-project fix rate of 33.3% overall and 80% or above for breaking updates where all clients invoke the affected API element uniformly. These results show that agentic generation of reusable fixing transformations is a viable approach to scalable repair of breaking updates.

As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly termed the agent harness. Changing this harness while holding model weights fixed can substantially alter task performance. Current agent evaluations typically report downstream performance under a chosen harness, leaving a model's ability to develop the harness itself comparatively underexplored. We introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that shifts the unit of evaluation from task outputs to runnable infrastructure. HarnessDev covers two stages. In Creation, the agent starts from a minimal seed and a small number of cases, then builds a complete execution system. In Evolution, it starts from its own created harness and iteratively revises it using downstream execution feedback, with the goal of improving benchmark performance. We then evaluate each constructed harness on capability (task success on held-out benchmarks) and efficiency (execution-token cost). The reported Creation results cover six creator LLMs, four domains, and five downstream benchmarks totaling 2,207 unique downstream instances, with hidden evaluation tasks withheld from development. We find that generated harnesses remain substantially behind mature human-engineered references on code and on search and research, while matching or exceeding the selected references on writing and machine-learning experimentation, with large variation in execution cost. Evolution produces some performance gains, but they are unstable and transfer only partially to held-out tasks. Experiments with a fixed runtime model further show that the gains depend strongly on the model executing the harness, indicating limited transfer across models.

Large language model (LLM) agents such as OpenClaw rely on reusable skills to perform complex tasks, yet these skills remain largely static after deployment. As a result, similar workflows, tool usage patterns, and failure modes are repeatedly rediscovered across users, preventing the system from improving with experience. While interactions from different users provide complementary signals about when a skill works or fails, existing systems lack a mechanism to convert such heterogeneous experiences into reliable skill updates. To address these issues, we present SkillClaw, a framework for collective skill evolution in multi-user agent ecosystems, which treats cross-user and over-time interactions as the primary signal for improving skills. SkillClaw continuously aggregates trajectories generated during use and processes them with an autonomous evolver, which identifies recurring behavioral patterns and translates them into updates to the skill set by refining existing skills or extending them with new capabilities. The resulting skills are maintained in a shared repository and synchronized across users, allowing improvements discovered in one context to propagate system-wide while requiring no additional effort from users. By integrating multi-user experience into ongoing skill updates, SkillClaw enables cross-user knowledge transfer and cumulative capability improvement, and experiments on WildClawBench show that limited interaction and feedback, it significantly improves the performance of Qwen3-Max in real-world agent scenarios.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous agents with complex reasoning and task-fulfillment capabilities using a wide range of tools. However, effectively identifying the most relevant tools for a given task becomes a key bottleneck as the toolset size grows, hindering reliable tool utilization. To address this, we introduce Re-Invoke, an unsupervised tool retrieval method designed to scale effectively to large toolsets without training. Specifically, we first generate a diverse set of synthetic queries that comprehensively cover different aspects of the query space associated with each tool document during the tool indexing phase. Second, we leverage LLM's query understanding capabilities to extract key tool-related context and underlying intents from user queries during the inference phase. Finally, we employ a novel multi-view similarity ranking strategy based on intents to pinpoint the most relevant tools for each query. Our evaluation demonstrates that Re-Invoke significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios, all within a fully unsupervised setting. Notably, on the ToolE datasets, we achieve a 20% relative improvement in nDCG@5 for single-tool retrieval and a 39% improvement for multi-tool retrieval.

Evolutionary program synthesis systems such as AlphaEvolve, OpenEvolve, and ShinkaEvolve offer a new approach to AI-assisted mathematical discovery. These systems utilize teams of large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate solutions to a problem as human readable code. These candidate solutions are then 'evolved' with the goal of improving them beyond what an LLM can produce in a single shot. While existing mathematical applications have mostly focused on problems of establishing bounds (e.g., sphere packing), the program synthesis approach is well suited to any problem where the solution takes the form of an explicit construction. With this in mind, in this paper we explore the use of OpenEvolve for combinatorial bijection discovery. We describe the results of applying OpenEvolve to three bijection construction problems involving Dyck paths, two of which are known and one of which is open. We find that while systems like OpenEvolve show promise as a valuable tool for combinatorialists, the problem of finding novel, research-level bijections remains a challenging task for current frontier systems, reinforcing the need for human mathematicians in the loop. We describe some lessons learned for others in the field interested in exploring the use of these systems.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents leverage the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs in real-world applications. To interface with an environment, these agents often rely on tools, such as web search or database APIs. As the agent provides the LLM with tool documentation along the user query, the completeness and correctness of this documentation is critical. However, tool documentation is often over-, under-, or ill-specified, impeding the agent's accuracy. Standard software testing approaches struggle to identify these errors as they are expressed in natural language. Thus, despite its importance, there currently exists no automated method to test the tool documentation for agents. To address this issue, we present ToolFuzz, the first method for automated testing of tool documentations. ToolFuzz is designed to discover two types of errors: (1) user queries leading to tool runtime errors and (2) user queries that lead to incorrect agent responses. ToolFuzz can generate a large and diverse set of natural inputs, effectively finding tool description errors at a low false positive rate. Further, we present two straightforward prompt-engineering approaches. We evaluate all three tool testing approaches on 32 common LangChain tools and 35 newly created custom tools and 2 novel benchmarks to further strengthen the assessment. We find that many publicly available tools suffer from underspecification. Specifically, we show that ToolFuzz identifies 20x more erroneous inputs compared to the prompt-engineering approaches, making it a key component for building reliable AI agents.

Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows. Yet most studies on tool-calling agents focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. In real-world applications, user requests are often (1) ambiguous, (2) changing over time, or (3) infeasible due to policy constraints, and training and evaluation data that cover these diverse, complex interaction patterns remain under-represented. To bridge the gap, we present Trajectory2Task, a verifiable data generation pipeline for studying tool use at scale under three realistic user scenarios: ambiguous intent, changing intent, and infeasible intents. The pipeline first conducts multi-turn exploration to produce valid tool-call trajectories. It then converts these trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. This process yields verifiable task that support closed-loop evaluation and training. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art LLMs on the generated complex user scenario tasks and observe frequent failures. Finally, using successful trajectories obtained from task rollouts, we fine-tune lightweight LLMs and find consistent improvements across all three conditions, along with better generalization to unseen tool-use domains, indicating stronger general tool-calling ability.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the introduction of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) have significantly expanded LLM agents' capability to interact dynamically with external tools and APIs. However, existing tool selection frameworks do not integrate MCP servers, instead relying heavily on error-prone manual updates to monolithic local tool repositories, leading to duplication, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. Additionally, current approaches abstract tool selection before the LLM agent is invoked, limiting its autonomy and hindering dynamic re-querying capabilities during multi-turn interactions. To address these issues, we introduce ScaleMCP, a novel tool selection approach that dynamically equips LLM agents with a MCP tool retriever, giving agents the autonomy to add tools into their memory, as well as an auto-synchronizing tool storage system pipeline through CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations with MCP servers as the single source of truth. We also propose a novel embedding strategy, Tool Document Weighted Average (TDWA), designed to selectively emphasize critical components of tool documents (e.g. tool name or synthetic questions) during the embedding process. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on a created dataset of 5,000 financial metric MCP servers, across 10 LLM models, 5 embedding models, and 5 retriever types, demonstrate substantial improvements in tool retrieval and agent invocation performance, emphasizing ScaleMCP's effectiveness in scalable, dynamic tool selection and invocation.

Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.

LLM-based evolution has emerged as a promising way to improve agents by refining non-parametric artifacts, but its wall-clock cost remains a major bottleneck. We identify that this cost comes from synchronized stage execution and imbalance inside each LLM-heavy stage. We present FlashEvolve, an efficient framework that replaces synchronized execution with asynchronous workers and queues, allowing different stages and steps to overlap. To handle data staleness introduced by asynchrony, FlashEvolve tracks artifact versions and applies different policies to update, discard, or patch stale artifacts. Unlike weight-space staleness in asynchronous RL, language-space staleness is inspectable and repairable: a stale artifact is not just delayed work, but readable evidence that the LLM can reflect on, revise, and turn into useful evolution signal. FlashEvolve further improves throughput and token efficiency with speculative stage completion and adaptive workflow control. On GEPA workloads, FlashEvolve improves proposal throughput by 3.5times on local vLLM and 4.9times on API serving over synchronous GEPA. The same design also applies to ACE and Meta-Harness.

Large language model (LLM) agents must generalize from tools seen during training to unseen tools at deployment. A key challenge is tool trialing, i.e., excessive trials waste the interaction budget, whereas selective trials enable exploration of unfamiliar tools. Existing outcome-based post-training leaves wasteful trials unguided, while turn-level supervision may suppress necessary exploration. We introduce ToolCompass, a post-training framework that guides tool trialing by organizing tool-call representations according to shared functions. Specifically, ToolCompass models each function class as a von Mises--Fisher distribution and jointly reduces intra-function variation across domains and increases inter-function separation. This structure transfers experience from seen tools to functionally similar unseen tools, directing exploration away from unrelated alternatives. ToolCompass requires no ground-truth call traces or unseen-tool access and incurs no inference overhead. Experiments on AppWorld and FTRL show consistent gains across GRPO, RFT, and DMPO. improves AppWorld OOD task success by up to 10.71 percentage points over vanilla post-training and performs best among competitive baselines on both benchmarks.

Commit messages are a valuable resource in comprehension of software evolution, since they provide a record of changes such as feature additions and bug repairs. Unfortunately, programmers often neglect to write good commit messages. Different techniques have been proposed to help programmers by automatically writing these messages. These techniques are effective at describing what changed, but are often verbose and lack context for understanding the rationale behind a change. In contrast, humans write messages that are short and summarize the high level rationale. In this paper, we adapt Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to automatically "translate" diffs into commit messages. We trained an NMT algorithm using a corpus of diffs and human-written commit messages from the top 1k Github projects. We designed a filter to help ensure that we only trained the algorithm on higher-quality commit messages. Our evaluation uncovered a pattern in which the messages we generate tend to be either very high or very low quality. Therefore, we created a quality-assurance filter to detect cases in which we are unable to produce good messages, and return a warning instead.

Tool use has turned large language models (LLMs) into powerful agents that can perform complex multi-step tasks by dynamically utilising external software components. However, these tools must be implemented in advance by human developers, hindering the applicability of LLM agents in domains which demand large numbers of highly specialised tools, like in life sciences and medicine. Motivated by the growing trend of scientific studies accompanied by public code repositories, we propose ToolMaker, a novel agentic framework that autonomously transforms papers with code into LLM-compatible tools. Given a short task description and a repository URL, ToolMaker autonomously installs required dependencies and generates code to perform the task, using a closed-loop self-correction mechanism to iteratively diagnose and rectify errors. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark comprising 15 diverse and complex computational tasks spanning both medical and non-medical domains with over 100 unit tests to objectively assess tool correctness and robustness. ToolMaker correctly implements 80% of the tasks, substantially outperforming current state-of-the-art software engineering agents. ToolMaker therefore is a step towards fully autonomous agent-based scientific workflows.

While large language model--powered agents can self-evolve by accumulating experience or by dynamically creating new assets (i.e., tools or expert agents), existing frameworks typically treat these two evolutionary processes in isolation. This separation overlooks their intrinsic interdependence: the former is inherently bounded by a manually predefined static toolset, while the latter generates new assets from scratch without experiential guidance, leading to limited capability growth and unstable evolution. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation. Guided by this paradigm, we propose the Mem^{textbf{2}Evolve}, which integrates two core components: Experience Memory and Asset Memory. Specifically, Mem^{2}Evolve leverages accumulated experience to guide the dynamic creation of assets, thereby expanding the agent's capability space while simultaneously acquiring new experience to achieve co-evolution. Extensive experiments across 6 task categories and 8 benchmarks demonstrate that Mem^{2}Evolve achieves improvement of 18.53\% over standard LLMs, 11.80\% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46\% over those evolving solely through asset creation, establishing it as a substantially more effective and stable self-evolving agent framework. Code is available at: https://buaa-irip-llm.github.io/Mem2Evolve.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift in programming, giving rise to "vibe coding", where users can build complete projects and even control computers using natural language instructions. This paradigm has driven automated webpage development, but it introduces a new requirement about how to automatically verify whether the web functionalities are reliably implemented. Existing works struggle to adapt, relying on static visual similarity or predefined checklists that constrain their utility in open-ended environments. Furthermore, they overlook a vital aspect of software quality, namely latent logical constraints. To address these gaps, we introduce WebTestBench, a benchmark for evaluating end-to-end automated web testing. WebTestBench encompasses comprehensive dimensions across diverse web application categories. We decompose the testing process into two cascaded sub-tasks, checklist generation and defect detection, and propose WebTester, a baseline framework for this task. Evaluating popular LLMs with WebTester reveals severe challenges, including insufficient test completeness, detection bottlenecks, and long-horizon interaction unreliability. These findings expose a substantial gap between current computer-use agent capabilities and industrial-grade deployment demands. We hope that WebTestBench provides valuable insights and guidance for advancing end-to-end automated web testing. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/friedrichor/WebTestBench.

Designing user interfaces (UIs) is a critical step when launching products, building portfolios, or personalizing projects, yet end users without design expertise often struggle to articulate their intent and to trust design choices. Existing example-based tools either promote broad exploration, which can cause overwhelm and design drift, or require adapting a single example, risking design fixation. We present UI Remix, an interactive system that supports mobile UI design through an example-driven design workflow. Powered by a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) model, UI Remix enables iterative search, selection, and adaptation of examples at both the global (whole interface) and local (component) level. To foster trust, it presents source transparency cues such as ratings, download counts, and developer information. In an empirical study with 24 end users, UI Remix significantly improved participants' ability to achieve their design goals, facilitated effective iteration, and encouraged exploration of alternative designs. Participants also reported that source transparency cues enhanced their confidence in adapting examples. Our findings suggest new directions for AI-assisted, example-driven systems that empower end users to design with greater control, trust, and openness to exploration.

In recent years, LLM-based multi-agent systems have been widely applied to orchestrate tool-using agents into executable communication graphs. However, existing self-evolving orchestration still faces key challenges, including post-hoc evolution that revises the team only after the trajectory ends, credit diffusion that gives every action the same terminal advantage under confounded baselines, and skill admission that is uncalibrated and never retired. To address these challenges, we propose EvoSteer, a new paradigm of Online Self-Evolving Graph Orchestration -- the orchestrator builds a running team and repairs its plausible but failing steps from execution features and a learned value estimate. To support this paradigm, we introduce Anchored Trajectory Balance (AnchorTB), a regression-style flow-matching loss that assigns each orchestration action a coefficient by balancing subtrajectories against a frozen reference. Built on the learned flow, we further propose Validated Skill Admission, in which a candidate skill is tried before promotion and promoted only if paired evidence passes a sequential test under a shared nominal testing budget. Moreover, AnchorTB combines measured task-level reference reward statistics with prefix-dependent corrections. Experimental results on twelve datasets show that EvoSteer significantly outperforms baselines across question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and interactive decision making. Our code is available at https://github.com/beita6969/evosteer.

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

Driven by rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), agents are empowered to combine intrinsic knowledge with dynamic tool use, greatly enhancing their capacity to address real-world tasks. In line with such an evolution, AgentScope introduces major improvements in a new version (1.0), towards comprehensively supporting flexible and efficient tool-based agent-environment interactions for building agentic applications. Specifically, we abstract foundational components essential for agentic applications and provide unified interfaces and extensible modules, enabling developers to easily leverage the latest progress, such as new models and MCPs. Furthermore, we ground agent behaviors in the ReAct paradigm and offer advanced agent-level infrastructure based on a systematic asynchronous design, which enriches both human-agent and agent-agent interaction patterns while improving execution efficiency. Building on this foundation, we integrate several built-in agents tailored to specific practical scenarios. AgentScope also includes robust engineering support for developer-friendly experiences. We provide a scalable evaluation module with a visual studio interface, making the development of long-trajectory agentic applications more manageable and easier to trace. In addition, AgentScope offers a runtime sandbox to ensure safe agent execution and facilitates rapid deployment in production environments. With these enhancements, AgentScope provides a practical foundation for building scalable, adaptive, and effective agentic applications.

LLM agents are increasingly deployed as systems built around editable external harnesses, including prompts, skills, memories and tools, that shape task execution without changing model parameters. Harness self-evolution adapts such agents by updating these harnesses from execution evidence. Yet it remains unclear whether a model's base capability in task-solving predicts its capabilities in harness self-evolution: which models produce useful harness updates, and which actually benefit from them? We analyze two harness self-evolution capabilities: (i) harness-updating, the capability to produce useful persistent harness updates from execution evidence; (ii) harness-benefit, the capability to benefit from updated harnesses during task solving. Our analysis reveals two findings. First, harness-updating is flat in base capability: models from different capability tiers produce harness updates that lead to surprisingly similar gains; even Qwen3.5-9B's updates yield gains comparable to those of Claude Opus~4.6. Second, harness-benefit is non-monotonic in base capability: weak-tier models benefit little from updated harnesses, mid-tier models benefit most, and strong-tier models benefit less than mid-tier. We trace low gains at the weak tier to two failure modes: weak-tier models may fail to activate relevant harness artifacts, or activate them but fail to follow them faithfully. These findings suggest investing capability budget in the task-solving agent rather than the evolver, and targeting harness invocation and long-horizon instruction following in agent training. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/A-EVO-Lab/a-evolve/tree/release/harness-evolution.

The paradigm of automated program generation is shifting from one-shot generation to inference-time search, where Large Language Models (LLMs) function as semantic mutation operators within evolutionary loops. While effective, these systems are currently governed by static schedules that fail to account for the non-stationary dynamics of the search process. This rigidity results in substantial computational waste, as resources are indiscriminately allocated to stagnating populations while promising frontiers remain under-exploited. We introduce AdaEvolve, a framework that reformulates LLM-driven evolution as a hierarchical adaptive optimization problem. AdaEvolve uses an "accumulated improvement signal" to unify decisions across three levels: Local Adaptation, which dynamically modulates the exploration intensity within a population of solution candidates; Global Adaptation, which routes the global resource budget via bandit-based scheduling across different solution candidate populations; and Meta-Guidance which generates novel solution tactics based on the previously generated solutions and their corresponding improvements when the progress stalls. We demonstrate that AdaEvolve consistently outperforms the open-sourced baselines across 185 different open-ended optimization problems including combinatorial, systems optimization and algorithm design problems.

Production LLM agents often waste latency and reliability by regenerating code for the same procedural steps on every request. We replace this inference-time coding loop with an agentic tool-making pipeline that compiles repeated SOP steps into validated, versioned tools before deployment. The tool-maker grounds synthesis in the live environment as it collects execution traces, observes backend schemas and values, generates candidate tools, and repairs them against labeled cases. At runtime, the production agent calls these tools directly and falls back to code generation only when needed. We deploy the approach in a Fulfillment Center alarm-triage system, where an agent diagnoses alarms against a 44-node SOP over heterogeneous metric backends. In production, tool calls reduce p50 latency by 42%. On 1,500 historical alarms, they reduce end-to-end error rate by up to 53% by suppressing run-to-run variance in repeated steps. Because tools return compact structured verdicts, they also enable a simpler direct-call architecture, reducing p50 latency by a further 62% in a controlled ablation. Versioned tools also improve auditability and expose specification gaps and upstream data drift. Our results show that self-evolving agents can make industrial LLM systems faster, more reliable, and easier to operate.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in environments that generate massive, dynamic contexts. However, a critical bottleneck remains: while agents have access to this context, their static prompts lack the mechanisms to manage it effectively, leading to recurring Corrective and Enhancement failures. To address this capability gap, we introduce SCOPE (Self-evolving Context Optimization via Prompt Evolution). SCOPE frames context management as an online optimization problem, synthesizing guidelines from execution traces to automatically evolve the agent's prompt. We propose a Dual-Stream mechanism that balances tactical specificity (resolving immediate errors) with strategic generality (evolving long-term principles). Furthermore, we introduce Perspective-Driven Exploration to maximize strategy coverage, increasing the likelihood that the agent has the correct strategy for any given task. Experiments on the HLE benchmark show that SCOPE improves task success rates from 14.23\% to 38.64\% without human intervention. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/SCOPE.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in using external tools to solve complex problems. However, existing approaches either involve fine-tuning on tool demonstrations, which do not generalize to new tools without additional training, or providing tool documentation in context, limiting the number of tools. Both approaches often generate syntactically invalid tool calls. In this paper, we propose ToolDec, a finite-state machine-guided decoding algorithm for tool-augmented LLMs. ToolDec eliminates tool-related errors for any tool-augmented LLMs by ensuring valid tool names and type-conforming arguments. Furthermore, ToolDec enables LLM to effectively select tools using only the information contained in their names, with no need for fine-tuning or in-context documentation. We evaluated multiple prior methods and their ToolDec-enhanced versions on a variety of tasks involving tools like math functions, knowledge graph relations, and complex real-world RESTful APIs. Our experiments show that ToolDec reduces syntactic errors to zero, consequently achieving significantly better performance and as much as a 2x speedup. We also show that ToolDec achieves superior generalization performance on unseen tools, performing up to 8x better than the baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in handling complex programming tasks. However, current methods rely on manual model selection and fixed workflows, which limit their ability to adapt to changing task complexities. To address this, we propose SEMAG, a Self-Evolutionary Multi-Agent code Generation framework that mimics human coding practices. It decomposes programming tasks into stages, including planning, coding, debugging, and discussion, while adapting workflows to task difficulty. Its self-evolutionary agents can access the latest models in real time and automatically upgrade the backbone model. SEMAG sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy across benchmarks. Using identical backbone models, SEMAG outperforms prior methods by 3.3% on CodeContests. When augmented with self-evolutionary model selection that automatically identifies optimal backbones, SEMAG reaches 52.6%, showcasing both framework effectiveness and adaptability to evolving LLM capabilities.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) introduces a standard specification that defines how Foundation Model (FM)-based agents should interact with external systems by invoking tools. However, to understand a tool's purpose and features, FMs rely on natural-language tool descriptions, making these descriptions a critical component in guiding FMs to select the optimal tool for a given (sub)task and to pass the right arguments to the tool. While defects or smells in these descriptions can misguide FM-based agents, their prevalence and consequences in the MCP ecosystem remain unclear. Hence, we examine 856 tools spread across 103 MCP servers empirically, assess their description quality, and their impact on agent performance. We identify six components of tool descriptions from the literature, develop a scoring rubric utilizing these components, and then formalize tool description smells based on this rubric. By operationalizing this rubric through an FM-based scanner, we find that 97.1% of the analyzed tool descriptions contain at least one smell, with 56% failing to state their purpose clearly. While augmenting these descriptions for all components improves task success rates by a median of 5.85 percentage points and improves partial goal completion by 15.12%, it also increases the number of execution steps by 67.46% and regresses performance in 16.67% of cases. These results indicate that achieving performance gains is not straightforward; while execution cost can act as a trade-off, execution context can also impact. Furthermore, component ablations show that compact variants of different component combinations often preserve behavioral reliability while reducing unnecessary token overhead, enabling more efficient use of the FM context window and lower execution costs.

We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox

AI-powered digital avatar streamers must answer product questions, engage viewers, and execute marketing strategies in real time, demanding low latency, frequent strategy updates, and accurate yet effective responses. Evolvable Harnesses, whose Skills, Hooks, prompts, and tools can be updated independently of model weights, enable rapid iteration but expose a trade-off: large models adapt zero-shot yet are too slow, whereas compact models meet latency targets but overfit to fixed Harness configurations. We propose Harness-Aware Training (HAT), which trains compact models to adapt to changing Harnesses. Its key component, Harness-State Augmentation (HSA), applies task-preserving transformations to Skill identifiers and content, tool schemas, prompt structures, and Hook functions. Training proceeds in three stages: HSA-SFT learns reasoning and tool use from strong-model trajectories across diverse environments; General On-Policy Distillation restores generalization lost during SFT; and HSA-RL improves robustness to changing Harnesses through reinforcement learning in augmented environments. Across four evaluation sets, HAT achieves 94.8 on Live-Stream QA (base: 80.3; strongest general LLM: 93.0) and 94.6 on Harness-Variant QA (base: 75.4). Unlike Fixed-Harness SFT, which lowers IFEval by 7.7 points from the base model, HAT avoids this regression and reaches 83.5. On one NVIDIA H20 GPU, the optimized system delivers P50 and P95 latencies of 3.4 s and 8.1 s. Deployed in Taobao Live's digital-avatar service, it also yields positive online A/B test results for GMV and item-page views.

Looped language models have shown promising results on reasoning benchmarks, yet their potential for agentic tool use remains largely unexplored. We study this question in compositional tool-calling settings, where models must coordinate multiple API calls, maintain intermediate state, and preserve dependencies across tool interactions. We evaluate native and retrofitted looped language models on API-Bank, BFCL, and NESTful, comparing looped and non-looped models trained under matched supervised fine-tuning recipes and varying recurrent depth at inference time. In controlled experiments, recurrent computation generally benefits compositional and dependency-aware tool use, while providing smaller and more model-dependent gains on isolated API invocation. Accuracy on multi-step tool use generally increases with recurrent depth; adaptive inference, however, achieves a more favorable compute-performance trade-off by allocating additional computation only when needed. Our results suggest that looped language models are a promising architecture for agentic systems that require reliable planning, coordination, and execution of compositional tool use workflows.

Current tool-use large language models (LLMs) are trained on static datasets, enabling them to interact with external tools and perform multi-step, tool-integrated reasoning, which produces tool-call trajectories. However, these models imitate how a query is resolved in a generic tool-call routine, thereby failing to explore possible solutions and demonstrating limited performance in an evolved, dynamic tool-call environment. In this work, we propose PORTool, a reinforcement learning (RL) method that encourages a tool-use LLM to explore various trajectories yielding the correct answer. Specifically, this method starts with generating multiple rollouts for a given query, and some of them share the first few tool-call steps, thereby forming a tree-like structure. Next, we assign rewards to each step, based on its ability to produce a correct answer and make successful tool calls. A shared step across different trajectories receives the same reward, while different steps under the same fork receive different rewards. Finally, these step-wise rewards are used to calculate fork-relative advantages, blended with trajectory-relative advantages, to train the LLM for tool use. The experiments utilize 17 tools to address user queries, covering both time-sensitive and time-invariant topics. We conduct ablation studies to systematically justify the necessity and the design robustness of step-wise rewards. Furthermore, we compare the proposed PORTool with other training approaches and demonstrate significant improvements in final accuracy and the number of tool-call steps.

This paper is an opinion paper that looks at the future of computing in the age of Generative \& Agentic AI. Current software systems are static and inflexible, leading to significant challenges in translating human goals into computational actions. "Living software systems" powered by generative AI offer a solution to this fundamental problem in computing. Traditional software development involves multiple layers of imperfect translation, from business requirements to code, resulting in rigid systems that struggle to adapt to changing user needs and contexts. Generative AI, particularly large language models, can serve as a universal translator between human intent and computer operations. This approach enables the creation of more flexible, context-aware systems that can dynamically evolve to meet user goals. Two pathways for implementing living software systems are explored: using generative AI to accelerate traditional software development, and leveraging agentic AI to create truly adaptive systems. New skills like Prompt Engineering are necessary. By reimagining software as a living, adaptable entity, we can create computing interfaces that are more intuitive, powerful, and responsive to human needs.