{
  "id": "coding-agent",
  "code": "PTL-0145",
  "term": "Coding Agent",
  "aliases": [
    "software engineering agent",
    "agentic coding",
    "AI coding assistant"
  ],
  "category": "agents",
  "definition": "A coding agent is an AI agent that works in a software repository by reading files, editing code, running commands and tests, and iterating on the results to complete programming tasks.",
  "description": "Research found that the interface matters as much as the model. Tools designed for a model, with concise file viewers, search, and editing commands that report errors, improved results over a raw shell. Coding agents are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench, which asks them to resolve real GitHub issues so that hidden tests pass.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "ai-agent"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "code-execution-tool",
    "vibe-coding",
    "function-calling"
  ],
  "introduced": 2024,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering",
      "authors": "Yang et al.",
      "year": 2024,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15793"
    },
    {
      "title": "SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?",
      "authors": "Jimenez et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06770"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/coding-agent/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Coding Agent. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0145). https://protologue.com/t/coding-agent/"
}