GHIssuemarket: A Sandbox Environment for SWE-Agents Economic Experimentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces GHIssuemarket, a sandbox environment for testing the economic viability of software engineering agents through simulated auctions and cryptocurrency micropayments, advancing research in intelligent software engineering economics.

Contribution

It presents a novel sandbox environment for economic experimentation with swe-agents, enabling realistic simulations of peer-to-peer GitHub issue outsourcing markets.

Findings

Sandbox supports autonomous auctioning and bidding by swe-agents.

Incorporates real-time communication and retrieval-augmented decision-making.

Facilitates exploration of swe-agents' economic viability in constrained environments.

Abstract

Software engineering agents (swe-agents), as key innovations in intelligent software engineering, are poised in the industry's end-of-programming debate to transcend from assistance to primary roles. we argue the importance of swe-agents' economic viability to their transcendence -- defined as their capacity to maintain efficient operations in constrained environments -- and propose its exploration via software engineering economics experimentation.we introduce ghissuemarket sandbox, a controlled virtual environment for swe-agents' economic experimentation, simulating the environment of an envisioned peer-to-peer multiagent system for github issues outsourcing auctions. in this controlled setting, autonomous swe-agents auction and bid on github issues, leveraging real-time communication, a built-in retrieval-augmented generation (rag) interface for effective decision-making, and instant cryptocurrency micropayments. we open-source our software artifacts, discuss our sandbox engineering decisions, and advocate towards swe-agents' economic exploration -- an emerging field we intend to pursue under the term intelligent software engineering economics (isee).