By @IBMResearch
Publication Date: 2025-12-08 13:00:00
Much like an automotive mechanic’s talents would be better spent fixing engines than patching flat tires all day, a software engineer’s value lies in their creative problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, workdays are easily eaten up by debugging, coding, and documentation. A new agentic AI tool from IBM Research aims to offload some of the more monotonous aspects of the software engineer’s job, and two new versions are leading the pack.
IBM’s software engineering (iSWE)-Agent for Java now occupies the number one and two spots on Multi-SWE-Bench in the Java category. One entry, based on the frontier model Claude 4.5 Sonnet, is at the top of the leaderboard, and the other, based on open-source models, is runner-up. These iSWE agents resolved 33% and 31% of Java issues on the benchmarking test, respectively.
iSWE-Agent uses two inputs: a Java or Python codebase, and an issue like a bug report or feature request. With these two inputs, it generates a patch whose purpose is to…
