Software Engineering Using Autonomous Agents: Are We There Yet?

Autonomous agents equipped with Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly gaining prominence as a revolutionary technology within the realm of Software Engineering. These intelligent and autonomous systems demonstrate the capacity to perform tasks and make independent decisions, leveraging their intrinsic reasoning and decision-making abilities. This paper delves into the current state of autonomous agents, their capabilities, challenges, and opportunities in Software Engineering practices. By employing different prompts (with or without context), we conclude the advantages of contextrich prompts for autonomous agents. Prompts with context enhance user requirement understanding, avoiding irrelevant details that could hinder task comprehension and degrade model performance, particularly when dealing with complex frameworks such as Spring Boot, Django, Flask, etc. This exploration is conducted using Auto-GPT (v0.3.0), an open-source application powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 which intelligently connects the “thoughts” of Large Language Models (LLMs) to independently accomplish the assigned goals or tasks.