PRISM benchmark of over 10k pairs shows LLMs have a 41% average drop from code execution success to spatial correctness in programmatic video generation.
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A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents
Canonical reference. 90% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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90% of classified citations
abstract
Code generation agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the software development paradigm. Distinct from previous code generation techniques, code generation agents are characterized by three core features. 1) Autonomy: the ability to independently manage the entire workflow, from task decomposition to coding and debugging. 2) Expanded task scope: capabilities that extend beyond generating code snippets to encompass the full software development lifecycle (SDLC). 3) Enhancement of engineering practicality: a shift in research emphasis from algorithmic innovation toward practical engineering challenges, such as system reliability, process management, and tool integration. This domain has recently witnessed rapid development and an explosion in research, demonstrating significant application potential. This paper presents a systematic survey of the field of LLM-based code generation agents. We trace the technology's developmental trajectory from its inception and systematically categorize its core techniques, including both single-agent and multi-agent architectures. Furthermore, this survey details the applications of LLM-based agents across the full SDLC, summarizes mainstream evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and catalogs representative tools. Finally, by analyzing the primary challenges, we identify and propose several foundational, long-term research directions for the future work of the field.
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SaaSBench introduces a heterogeneous benchmark for enterprise SaaS engineering and shows that state-of-the-art coding agents fail over 95% of the time before reaching deep business logic due to setup and integration problems.
TDDev automates the full TDD loop for web app generation from requirements, delivering 34-48 percentage point quality gains and zero manual intervention in user studies.
BioXArena benchmarks LLM agents on generating end-to-end ML pipelines for 76 multi-modal biomedical tasks, with MLEvolve plus Gemini-3.1-Pro scoring highest at 0.666.
PerfCodeBench reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs produce functionally correct but significantly slower code than expert-optimized versions on system-level tasks, especially those involving parallelism and GPUs.
AdverMCTS frames code generation as a minimax game where an attacker evolves tests to expose flaws in solver-generated code, yielding more robust outputs than static-test baselines.
Chain-of-Thought prompting balances high accuracy with low energy use in small language models for code generation, while multi-sampling strategies add high energy costs for small accuracy gains.
LLMs display clear performance stratification on formal language tasks aligned with Chomsky hierarchy complexity levels, limited by severe efficiency barriers rather than absolute capability.
Think-Anywhere lets LLMs invoke on-demand reasoning at any token during code generation via cold-start imitation followed by outcome-based RL, reaching state-of-the-art results on LeetCode, LiveCodeBench, HumanEval, and MBPP.
SelfEvolve achieves 92.7% Pass@1 success on 11 runtime self-extension tasks and outperforms baselines like AutoGen by 61.8% with statistical significance.
Human-AI collaboration on CentaurEval's collaboration-necessary tasks reaches 31.11% success, far above standalone humans at 18.89% or LLMs at 0.67%.
CodeRL+ integrates variable-level execution trajectory inference into RLVR training to align textual code representations with execution semantics, delivering 4.6% relative pass@1 gains and generalization to code-reasoning and test-output tasks.
A closed-loop multi-agent LLM framework enables heterogeneous robots to collaboratively manipulate objects by decomposing tasks, grounding actions via visual tools, and recovering from execution failures hierarchically.
High-velocity agentic coding becomes governable when engineers convert recurring structural failures into durable, machine-actionable governance mechanisms rather than relying on continuous human code review.
SAIGuard uses communication-state simulation on the MAS interaction graph to detect and sanitize risky messages via reconstruction deviations, reducing attack success while preserving utility.
SCORE is a shared-parameter co-evolutionary framework coupling generation and evaluation of deep research reports with a meta-harness to adapt evaluation standards as performance improves.
A typed-contract harness with containerized 'chambers' and robotics-specific agent skills lets a coding LLM turn a single natural-language prompt into working reproduction, evaluation, and deployment workflows for robot learning.
More capable LLMs and agents generate code with greater volume and architectural decay, following a Volume-Quality Inverse Law that neither functional correctness nor prompting mitigates.
QuantClaw dynamically routes precision in agent workflows to cut cost by up to 21.4% and latency by 15.7% while keeping or improving task performance.
LLM agents resolve fewer than half of issues while satisfying design constraints despite passing tests, as shown by a benchmark of 495 issues and 1787 constraints from six repositories.
ACE-Bench is an execution-free benchmark that scores LLM coding agents on correct Azure SDK usage via deterministic regex checks and reference-based LLM judges derived from official documentation.
An LLM agent integrated with AVEVA Process Simulation via MCP enables natural language driven flowsheet analysis, optimization, and construction for chemical separation processes.
SPIRE approximates page-level slide personalization by training agents to denoise corrupted slide structures via collaborative RL, claiming a proof of consistency as a surrogate for inverse planning.
TacEvo is an LLM-driven self-evolving search method that discovers neural architectures for robotic tactile force regression and grating classification, reporting fitness gains of 56.1% and 96.1% over 20 generations.
citing papers explorer
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PRISM: A Benchmark for Programmatic Spatial-Temporal Reasoning
PRISM benchmark of over 10k pairs shows LLMs have a 41% average drop from code execution success to spatial correctness in programmatic video generation.
-
SaaSBench: Exploring the Boundaries of Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Enterprise SaaS Engineering
SaaSBench introduces a heterogeneous benchmark for enterprise SaaS engineering and shows that state-of-the-art coding agents fail over 95% of the time before reaching deep business logic due to setup and integration problems.
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From Runnable to Shippable: Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development for Generating Full-Stack Web Applications from Requirements
TDDev automates the full TDD loop for web app generation from requirements, delivering 34-48 percentage point quality gains and zero manual intervention in user studies.
-
BioXArena: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Multi-Modal Biomedical Machine Learning Tasks
BioXArena benchmarks LLM agents on generating end-to-end ML pipelines for 76 multi-modal biomedical tasks, with MLEvolve plus Gemini-3.1-Pro scoring highest at 0.666.
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PerfCodeBench: Benchmarking LLMs for System-Level High-Performance Code Optimization
PerfCodeBench reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs produce functionally correct but significantly slower code than expert-optimized versions on system-level tasks, especially those involving parallelism and GPUs.
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AdverMCTS: Combating Pseudo-Correctness in Code Generation via Adversarial Monte Carlo Tree Search
AdverMCTS frames code generation as a minimax game where an attacker evolves tests to expose flaws in solver-generated code, yielding more robust outputs than static-test baselines.
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Evaluating the Environmental Impact of using SLMs and Prompt Engineering for Code Generation
Chain-of-Thought prompting balances high accuracy with low energy use in small language models for code generation, while multi-sampling strategies add high energy costs for small accuracy gains.
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Evaluating the Formal Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models through Chomsky Hierarchy
LLMs display clear performance stratification on formal language tasks aligned with Chomsky hierarchy complexity levels, limited by severe efficiency barriers rather than absolute capability.
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Think Anywhere in Code Generation
Think-Anywhere lets LLMs invoke on-demand reasoning at any token during code generation via cold-start imitation followed by outcome-based RL, reaching state-of-the-art results on LeetCode, LiveCodeBench, HumanEval, and MBPP.
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Software Self-Extension with SelfEvolve: an Agentic Architecture for Runtime Code Generation
SelfEvolve achieves 92.7% Pass@1 success on 11 runtime self-extension tasks and outperforms baselines like AutoGen by 61.8% with statistical significance.
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CentaurEval: Benchmarking Human-in-the-Loop Value in Agentic Coding
Human-AI collaboration on CentaurEval's collaboration-necessary tasks reaches 31.11% success, far above standalone humans at 18.89% or LLMs at 0.67%.
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CodeRL+: Improving Code Generation via Reinforcement with Execution Semantics Alignment
CodeRL+ integrates variable-level execution trajectory inference into RLVR training to align textual code representations with execution semantics, delivering 4.6% relative pass@1 gains and generalization to code-reasoning and test-output tasks.
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A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation
A closed-loop multi-agent LLM framework enables heterogeneous robots to collaboratively manipulate objects by decomposing tasks, grounding actions via visual tools, and recovering from execution failures hierarchically.
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Cheap Code, Costly Judgment: A Case Study on Governable Agentic Software Engineering
High-velocity agentic coding becomes governable when engineers convert recurring structural failures into durable, machine-actionable governance mechanisms rather than relying on continuous human code review.
-
SAIGuard: Communication-State Simulation for Proactive Defense of LLM Multi-Agent Systems
SAIGuard uses communication-state simulation on the MAS interaction graph to detect and sanitize risky messages via reconstruction deviations, reducing attack success while preserving utility.
-
Self-Evolving Deep Research via Joint Generation and Evaluation
SCORE is a shared-parameter co-evolutionary framework coupling generation and evaluation of deep research reports with a meta-harness to adapt evaluation standards as performance improves.
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Nautilus: From One Prompt to Plug-and-Play Robot Learning
A typed-contract harness with containerized 'chambers' and robotics-specific agent skills lets a coding LLM turn a single natural-language prompt into working reproduction, evaluation, and deployment workflows for robot learning.
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AI-Generated Smells: An Analysis of Code and Architecture in LLM and Agent-Driven Development
More capable LLMs and agents generate code with greater volume and architectural decay, following a Volume-Quality Inverse Law that neither functional correctness nor prompting mitigates.
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QuantClaw: Precision Where It Matters for OpenClaw
QuantClaw dynamically routes precision in agent workflows to cut cost by up to 21.4% and latency by 15.7% while keeping or improving task performance.
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Does Pass Rate Tell the Whole Story? Evaluating Design Constraint Compliance in LLM-based Issue Resolution
LLM agents resolve fewer than half of issues while satisfying design constraints despite passing tests, as shown by a benchmark of 495 issues and 1787 constraints from six repositories.
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ACE-Bench: A Lightweight Benchmark for Evaluating Azure SDK Usage Correctness
ACE-Bench is an execution-free benchmark that scores LLM coding agents on correct Azure SDK usage via deterministic regex checks and reference-based LLM judges derived from official documentation.
-
Large Language Model Agent for User-friendly Chemical Process Simulations
An LLM agent integrated with AVEVA Process Simulation via MCP enables natural language driven flowsheet analysis, optimization, and construction for chemical separation processes.
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Personalization as Inverse Planning: Learning Latent Design Intents for Agentic Slide Generation via Structural Denoising
SPIRE approximates page-level slide personalization by training agents to denoise corrupted slide structures via collaborative RL, claiming a proof of consistency as a surrogate for inverse planning.
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TacEvo: Self-Evolving Architecture Discovery for Robotic Tactile Perception via LLM-Driven Quality-Diversity Search
TacEvo is an LLM-driven self-evolving search method that discovers neural architectures for robotic tactile force regression and grating classification, reporting fitness gains of 56.1% and 96.1% over 20 generations.
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Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Active Spatial Brain and Generalizable Action Cerebellum
A multi-agent large-model framework (Active Spatial Brain + Generalizable Action Cerebellum) enables spatial-aware humanoid whole-body manipulation without task-specific real-robot data.
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Code as Agent Harness
A survey that organizes existing work on LLM-based agents around code as the central harness, structured in three layers of interfaces, mechanisms, and multi-agent scaling, with applications across domains and listed open challenges.
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Context Training with Active Information Seeking
Active information seeking via search tools, when combined with multi-candidate context pruning during training, produces consistent gains on translation, health, and reasoning tasks over naive tool addition or no-tool baselines.
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TDD Governance for Multi-Agent Code Generation via Prompt Engineering
An AI-native TDD framework operationalizes classical TDD principles as prompt-level and workflow-level governance mechanisms in a layered multi-agent architecture to improve stability and reproducibility of LLM code generation.
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Agentic Insight Generation in VSM Simulations
A two-step agentic system for extracting insights from VSM simulations achieves up to 86% accuracy with top LLMs by using progressive data discovery and slim context.
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Agentic Agile-V: From Vibe Coding to Verified Engineering in Software and Hardware Development
Agentic Agile-V uses Agile-V as backbone and a Specify-Constrain-Orchestrate-Prove-Evolve-Verify loop to convert AI agent conversations into traceable engineering artifacts with acceptance evidence.
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Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models
The paper reviews conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, effective designs, critical challenges, and future directions for LLM-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning.
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Sustainable Code Generation Using Large Language Models: A Systematic Literature Review
A systematic review finds research on the sustainability of LLM-generated code to be limited, fragmented, and without accepted frameworks for measurement or benchmarking.
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LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Code Generation: A Multi-Vocal Literature Review
A review of 114 studies classifies motivations into nine categories, analyzes common models and benchmarks, synthesizes challenges into six categories with 26 subcategories and solutions, and identifies six future research directions with 18 subcategories.