Topic 11: Coding Agents

Learning Goals

• Know how coding agents grew out of work on statistical language models for text completion

• Understand the general architecture of frontier coding agents

• See how skills files make it easy to customize coding agents

• Be familiar with the use of evolutionary programming in recent research on coding agents

Lesson Plans

• coding_1_history

• coding_2_claude

• coding_3_evolution

Slides

• coding_1_history.pptx

• coding_2_claude.pptx

• coding_3_evolution.pptx

Tasks

Work on your final project

Papers

Novikov, A., Vũ, N., Eisenberger, M., Dupont, E., Huang, P.-S., Wagner, A. Z., Shirobokov, S., Kozlovskii, B., Ruiz, F. J. R., Mehrabian, A., Kumar, M. P., See, A., Chaudhuri, S., Holland, G., Davies, A., Nowozin, S., Kohli, P., & Balog, M. (2025). AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.13131

Chen, T., Ye, Z., Xu, B., Ye, Z., Liu, T., Hassani, A., Chen, T., Kerr, A., Wu, H., Xu, Y., Chen, Y.-J., Chen, H., Kane, A., Krashinsky, R., Liu, M.-Y., Grover, V., Ceze, L., Bringmann, R., Tran, J., Liu, W., Xie, F., Lightstone, M., & Shi, H. (2026). AVO: Agentic variation operators for autonomous evolutionary search. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.24517

Alzubi, S., Provenzano, N., Bingham, J., Chen, W., & Vu, T. (2026). EvoSkill: Automated skill discovery for multi-agent systems. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.02766