Mingyi Liu | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

Software Engineering in the Agent Era From Trustworthy Change to Human Agent Software Organizations

Software agents make digital execution elastic: repository analysis, code generation, testing, migration, tool use, and operations can be replicated and parallelized without proportional human headcount. Problem framing, semantic commitment, verification, integration, attention, and residual-risk acceptance remain bounded by human cognition, organizational authority, and economic capacity. How should scalable execution be governed so organizations can accept and sustain its changes? Our testable framework has two constructs and one execution abstraction. Trustworthy Change (TC) is the engineering object moving from intent through delegated execution, verification, integration, acceptance, and operation. Responsibility Topology classifies organizations by the distribution of independent residual-risk acceptance authority. A single-center topology has one final baseline responsibility anchor; a multi-anchor topology requires joint acceptance across independently governed domains. The Human-Agent Cell (HAC) produces candidates, proposals, and evidence; execution grants no acceptance authority. As execution and authority scale differently, distributed HACs create context-coherence and invalidation pressures, while multi-anchor governance adds joint acceptance and explicit responsibility closure. Responsibility, accountability, change management, specification, verification, and human oversight predate this work; our claim is only that agent-scaled execution changes how they fit together. We make that authority an explicit classification axis and derive consequences for change state, shared engineering facts, verification, and flow control. Progressive Specification and bounded-capacity analysis remain hypotheses to test, not laws. We contribute theory construction and operationalization; empirical validity remains open to controlled, longitudinal, and field studies.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Prediction-Robust Service Deployment with Capacity-Aware Edge Admission

Edge platforms instantiate executable services close to users to reduce request-serving cost, but each instance incurs a one-time deployment cost and remains useful only for a finite time-to-live (TTL). The resulting online decision is both prediction-sensitive and capacity-coupled: an optimistic forecast can waste deployment cost, whereas a delayed decision misses the burst it is intended to serve. We study this problem under a common TTL cost model and propose CAPSUM, a capacity-aware admission policy with an elastic specialization, CAPSUM-E. In the local elastic setting, every node-service trace is exactly a variable-price Bahncard instance. This reduction lets CAPSUM-E inherit PFSUM's tight prediction-error-dependent ratio, including $2/(1+β)$ consistency and $1/β$ robustness for $β>0$. A redirect-aware variant preserves the same local deployment schedule. For finite-capacity nodes, CAPSUM combines size-scaled break-even tests, a utilization-dependent shadow price, and evidence-density eviction; we prove capacity feasibility, scale invariance, and exact agreement with CAPSUM-E under an elastic configuration. We implement an exact local offline dynamic program and compare against direct common-model baselines and documented source-derived adapters for EDP-A, OREO, and uEDC-L. Experiments cover controlled prediction error, three synthetic demand regimes, a causal predictor on a public Globus Compute trace, and joint scaling to 1,024 nodes and 10,000 services. Under the common model, CAPSUM reduces normalized cost by 33.7-42.9% relative to the best source-derived adapter across the synthetic regimes and by 45.5% on the sampled trace.

cs.DC↗