Plans Work in Mysterious Ways: Evaluating a Plan Mode for Spreadsheet Agents

Constrained Creativity for SysOps Agents

How Experienced Developers Can Get More Value from Agents

AI agents are becoming a fundamental part of modern software creation, helping developers in generating code, debugging, designing systems, etc. But there is a clear difference between how beginners and experienced software engineers get benefits from these tools. Newbies usually depend on agents for one-time prompts and quick answers, whereas mature users utilize them through well-defined, repeated workflows that raise productivity and consistency. In this article, we discuss this difference and emphasize that getting the full potential does not merely depend on better prompts but on workflows driven by instructions developers create clear and reusable instruction files to direct agent behavior across tasks. When developers stop seeing agents only as chat interfaces but as programmable collaborators, they can produce more reliable and high-quality outputs. We offer in our paper methods like designing modular instructions, narrowing down the context, and iterative refinement loops, as well as a case study illustrating how a team made a code review more efficient and minimized the rework by making agent instructions standard. The results stress that structured forms of interaction rather than sporadic use are the main ways to tap into advanced features. Our paper provides a conceptual model for agent usage at large scale, hands-on advice for the implementation of instruction files in actual settings, and validation that skillful developers can far exceed basic usage by adopting orderly, system-like approaches to agent collaboration.

Beyond the Leaderboard: A Synthesis of Tool-Use, Planning, and Reasoning Failures in Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts. This paper synthesizes 27 benchmark, taxonomy, and audit papers (2023-2026), spanning 19 distinct benchmarks, into a cross-cutting taxonomy of agent limitations. To our knowledge, this is the first synthesis that integrates evidence across tool use, planning, long-horizon reasoning, multi-agent coordination, safety, and measurement validity into a single, unified taxonomy of LLM agent limitations. We identify six failure clusters: (1) tool invocation and parameter-level errors, (2) planning and constraint-satisfaction failures, (3) long-horizon degradation from context accumulation, (4) multi-agent coordination failures, (5) safety and security failures under adversarial or underspecified conditions, and (6) measurement validity problems. The taxonomy was derived iteratively by grouping independently reported error categories into themes corresponding to distinct stages of the agent reasoning-to-action pipeline. Across the literature, we find that failures compound nonlinearly with task length, that strong performance on individual sub-tasks does not reliably translate into end-to-end success, and that additional scaffolding does not consistently improve reliability. At the same time, substantial progress has been demonstrated in single-turn tool use, short-horizon web navigation, and narrowly scoped coding tasks.

IDE Agent Mode Explained: When to Use It and Which Model to Pick

IDE Agent Mode is changing how the developers work, from writing code to debugging & software management, by embedding powerful AI features right inside popular development setups. This article first conceptualizes IDE Agent Mode as a workflow where AIs are coding partners that not only understand the context of the project but are also able to write code, suggest better solutions, automate routine tasks, and even help with debugging at the same time. With the increase in the complexities of software projects and the trend towards shorter development cycles, AI-driven software development has become an effective way to enhance developers' productivity, minimize human errors, and foster innovation. On the other hand, deciding which AI model should be used for which programming task remains one thorny issue that developers and companies face. This is due to significant differences among models in their performance, speed, reasoning capabilities, cost, management of context, and compatibility with the development tools. This article not only lists the AI models that are most often used in IDE Agent environments but also assesses their performance in various coding assistance tasks such as code completion, bug fixing, documentation generation, and architectural reasoning. The method includes a comparative study, obtaining developer feedback, and assessment of the practical workflow in order to determine the pros and cons of different models in real-life software engineering situations. Results show that there is no 'silver bullet' model that fits all requirements; rather, the choice of model should be tailored to the project's needs, the professional level of the team, and scalability requirements, as well as financial constraints. The research also reveals that small models serve very well for fast coding assistance, whereas the more feature-heavy models are quite apt at doing complex tasks such as debugging and system-level designing.

MUSE: An Interactive Meta-Agent for Understanding and Steering LLM-powered Data Science Systems

Recent advances in large language models have enabled a new class of agentic data science systems that allow users to complete complex data science workflows through natural language. Although these systems can significantly reduce manual effort, it remains difficult to diagnose their behavior and steer the reasoning process when failures or unexpected outputs occur. We present MUSE, an interactive meta-agent that enhances user understanding and control of agentic data science systems by (1) dynamically restructuring low-level execution traces into multiple semantic levels that support navigation from high-level overviews to low-level implementation details; (2) enabling users to reference specific workflow steps in context to ask grounded questions, provide feedback, and revise problematic steps without manually locating relevant execution history; and (3) supporting mixed-initiative steering by surfacing suspicious steps for inspection, scaffolding the repair process, and translating user repair intent into contextualized instructions for the underlying agent. In a between-subjects study (n = 15), MUSE improved task efficiency and increased users'confidence in understanding and steering agentic data science workflows.

ICAE-Bench: Evaluating Coding Agents as Interactive Project Builders

ICAE-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating coding agents under interactive project-building settings, starts from a fuzzy product requirement, simulating the dynamic paradigm with an automated User Agent, and introduces three key designs.