GHIssuemarket: A Sandbox Environment for SWE-Agents Economic Experimentation
Mohamed A. Fouad, Marcelo de Almeida Maia
TL;DR
The paper proposes GHIssueMarket, a sandboxed, decentralized MAS to study the economic viability of SWE-Agents in outsourcing GitHub issues. It integrates IPFS PubSub for real-time communication, the Lightning Network for micropayments, and a RAG-enabled decision layer to support agent decisions, all within an open-source framework. By situating SWE-Agents in an interdisciplinary ISEE context (combining MAS, GT, MD, ACE, and GABMs), it aims to empirically evaluate how auction-based mechanisms and environment design influence agent cost-efficiency and behavior. The work sets the stage for systematic experimentation and community-driven development to advance intelligent software engineering economics and practical deployment of SWE-Agents.
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).