GHIssuemarket: A Sandbox Environment for SWE-Agents Economic Experimentation

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).