[2603.21489] Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.21489 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents Authors:Jiayi Geng, Graham Neubig View a PDF of the paper titled Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents, by Jiayi Geng and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI agents have become increasingly capable at isolated software engineering (SWE) tasks such as resolving issues on Github. Yet long-horizon tasks involving multiple interdependent subtasks still pose challenges both with respect to accuracy, and with respect to timely completion. A natural approach to solving these long-horizon tasks in a timely manner is asynchronous multi-agent collaboration, where multiple agents work on different parts of the task at the same time. But effective application of multi-agent systems has proven surprisingly difficult: concurrent edits by multiple agents interfere with each other, dependencies are difficult to synchronize, and combining partial progress into a coherent whole is challenging. On the other hand, human developers have long relied on mature collaboration infrastructure to manage these challenges in large software projects. Inspired by these collaboration primitives, we introduce Centralized Asynchronous Isolated Delegation (CAID), a structured multi-agent coordination paradigm grounded in three core SWE primitives: centralized task delegation, asynchronous execution...