[2605.06717] Agentic Coding Needs Proactivity, Not Just Autonomy

Computer Science > Software Engineering arXiv:2605.06717 (cs) [Submitted on 7 May 2026] Title:Agentic Coding Needs Proactivity, Not Just Autonomy Authors:Nghi D. Q. Bui, Georgios Evangelopoulos View a PDF of the paper titled Agentic Coding Needs Proactivity, Not Just Autonomy, by Nghi D. Q. Bui and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Coding agents are rapidly changing the landscape of software development, moving from inline completion to autonomous systems that edit repositories, open pull requests, respond to issues, and run scheduled or webhook triggered routines across the development life cycle. The next generation is increasingly described as proactive and long-horizon: agents should notice relevant changes before the developer asks, connect signals across tools, decide when to interrupt, and carry preferences across sessions. Yet the field still lacks a clear account of what proactivity means for software development, how it differs from autonomy, what acceptance criteria proactive long-horizon tasks should satisfy, and which metrics determine whether unsolicited agent behavior is useful rather than merely active. Proactive coding agents should be evaluated by the quality and improvement of their insight policy: the policy that decides what matters next, what evidence supports it, whether to show it, and how to adapt after feedback. This view is grounded in the principles of mixed initiative interaction. We propose a three level taxonomy of proacti...