Agentic AI for Software: Lessons in Trust from AutoCodeRover
                    
                    
                    
                        
                            Abstract:
  AI agents have recently shown significant promise in software engineering. Much public attention has been transfixed on the topic of code generation from Large Language Models (LLMs) via a prompt. However, software engineering is much more than programming, and AI agents go far beyond instructions given by a prompt.  Conceptually, the key to successfully developing trustworthy agentic AI-based software workflows will be to resolve the core difficulty in software engineering - the deciphering and clarification of developer intent. Specification inference, or deciphering the intent, thus lies at the heart of many software tasks, including software maintenance and program repair. A successful deployment of agentic technology into software engineering would involve making conceptual progress in such intent inference via agents. We discuss, to some length, the AutoCodeRover agent which embodies such intent inference. The agent has been integrated into the SonarQube static analysis tool, which is used by many enterprise customers.  Trusting the AI agent becomes a key aspect, for coding agents to be put into production. Higher automation also leads to higher volume of code being automatically generated, and then integrated into code-bases. To deal with this explosion, an emerging direction is AI-based verification and validation (V & V) of AI generated code. We posit that agentic software workflows in future will include such AI-based V&V. 
 Bio:
 Abhik Roychoudhury is Provost's Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he leads a research team on Trustworthy and Secure Software (TSS). He is Senior Advisor at SonarSource, subsequent to the acquisition of his spinoff AutoCodeRover on AI agents for coding. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Stony Brook University in 2000, and has been a faculty member at NUS School of Computing since 2001. Abhik's group at NUS has focused on symbolic program analysis, along with applications of program analysis to areas such as computer security, agentic AI or cyber-physical systems. These works have been honored with various awards including an International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) Most Influential Paper Award (Test-of-time award) for symbolic analysis based program repair, IEEE New Directions Award 2022 (jointly with Cristian Cadar) for contributions to symbolic execution. Abhik was the inaugural recipient of the NUS Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award. Doctoral students graduated from his research team have taken up faculty positions in many top academic institutions, and they have gone on to receive many prestigious early career awards (including ACM-W Rising Star Award given to only one female faculty member in Computing). Abhik has served the software engineering research community in various capacities including as chair of the major conferences (ICSE and FSE), as well as chair of the FSE steering committee. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), and a member of the editorial board of Communications of the ACM. Abhik is a Fellow of the ACM, recognized for contributions to automated program repair and fuzz testing.
                        
                    
                    
                        
                            
                                
                                     Thursday, November 13, 2025
                                    @15h00
                                
                            
                            
                                3195, Pav. André-Aisenstadt
                                    Thursday, November 13, 2025
                                    @15h00
                                
                            
                            
                                3195, Pav. André-Aisenstadt