Agents as Software: A Programming Languages Agenda for Agent Reliability

Abstract:AI agents increasingly resemble software systems: they call tools, remember facts, follow policies, delegate work, and take actions with real consequences. % Yet the ``program'' of an agent is scattered across prompts, tools, memories, workflows, and execution traces, making its behavior difficult to inspect through ordinary testing and debugging alone. % This essay argues that a programming-systems perspective offers a natural lens for making agents reliable. % We recast agents as programmable artifacts whose behavior can be specified over traces and state, checked before deployment, monitored during execution, and improved from observed failures. % The goal is not to make probabilistic agents behave like deterministic programs, but to give them enough structure that their behavior can be reasoned about, controlled, and repaired.

Accepted to Onward! at SPLASH 2026

Programming Languages (cs.PL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.32198 [cs.PL]

(or arXiv:2609.32198v1 [cs.PL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32198 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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