Toward an Agentic Infused Software Ecosystem
This work addresses the problem of enabling effective AI agent integration in software ecosystems for developers, but it is incremental as it outlines a vision without presenting new empirical results.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating AI agents into software development by proposing an Agentic Infused Software Ecosystem (AISE) built on three pillars: AI agents, programming tools/APIs, and runtime environments, aiming to create a synergistic framework for future collaboration between humans and agents.
Fully leveraging the capabilities of AI agents in software development requires a rethinking of the software ecosystem itself. To this end, this paper outlines the creation of an Agentic Infused Software Ecosystem (AISE), that rests on three pillars. The first, of course, is the AI agents themselves, which in the past 5 years have moved from simple code completion and toward sophisticated independent development tasks, a trend which will only continue. The second pillar is the programming language and APIs (or tools) that these agents use to accomplish tasks, and increasingly, serve as the communication substrate that humans and AI agents interact and collaborate through. The final pillar is the runtime environment and ecosystem that agents operate within, and which provide the capabilities that programmatic agents use to interface with (and effect actions in) the external world. To realize the vision of AISE, all three pillars must be advanced in a holistic manner, and critically, in a manner that is synergistic for AI agents as they exist today, those that will exist in the future, and for the human developers that work alongside them.