SWE-AF

Autonomous Engineering Team Runtime Built on AgentField

Pronounced: "swee-AF" (one word)

One API call → full engineering team → shipped code.

One API call spins up a full autonomous engineering team — product managers, architects, coders, reviewers, testers — that scopes, builds, adapts, and ships complex software end to end. SWE-AF is a first step toward autonomous software engineering factories, scaling from simple goals to hard multi-issue programs with hundreds to thousands of agent invocations.

One-Call DX

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/execute/async/swe-planner.build \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @- <<'JSON'
{
  "input": {
    "goal": "Refactor and harden auth + billing flows",
    "repo_url": "https://github.com/user/my-project",
    "config": {
      "runtime": "claude_code",
      "models": {
        "default": "sonnet",
        "coder": "opus",
        "qa": "opus"
      },
      "enable_learning": true
    }
  }
}
JSON

Swap models.default and any role key (coder, qa, architect, etc.) to any model your runtime supports.

Operating Modes

SWE-AF works in two modes: point it at a single repository, or orchestrate coordinated changes across multiple repos in one build.

Single-Repository Mode

The default. Pass repo_url (remote) or repo_path (local) and SWE-AF handles everything:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/execute/async/swe-planner.build \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "input": {
      "goal": "Add JWT auth",
      "repo_url": "https://github.com/user/my-project"
    }
  }'

Multi-Repository Mode

When your work spans multiple codebases — a primary app plus shared libraries, monorepo sub-projects, or dependent microservices — pass config.repos as an array with roles:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/execute/async/swe-planner.build \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "input": {
      "goal": "Add JWT auth across API and shared-lib",
      "config": {
        "repos": [
          {
            "repo_url": "https://github.com/org/main-app",
            "role": "primary"
          },
          {
            "repo_url": "https://github.com/org/shared-lib",
            "role": "dependency"
          }
        ],
        "runtime": "claude_code",
        "models": {
          "default": "sonnet"
        }
      }
    }
  }'

Roles:

• primary — The main application. Changes here drive the build; failures block progress.
• dependency — Libraries or services modified to support the primary repo. Failures are captured but don't block.

Use cases:

• Primary app + shared SDK or utilities library
• Monorepo sub-projects that live in separate repos
• Feature spanning multiple microservices (e.g., API + worker queue)

Autonomous Build Spotlight

Rust-based Python compiler benchmark (built autonomously):

| Metric | CPython (subprocess) | RustPython (SWE-AF) | Improvement | | ---------------------- | -------------------- | ---------------------------- | ----------------------- | | Steady-state execution | Baseline (~19ms) | Optimized in-process runtime | 88.3x-602.3x faster | | Geometric mean | 1.0x baseline | 253.8x | 253.8x | | Peak throughput | ~52 ops/s | 31,807 ops/s | ~612x |

Throughput comparison measures different execution models: CPython subprocess spawn (~19ms per call → ~52 ops/s) vs RustPython pre-warmed interpreter pool (in-process). This is the real-world tradeoff the system was built to optimize — replacing repeated subprocess invocations with a persistent pool for short-snippet execution.

Artifact trail includes 175 tracked autonomous agents across planning, coding, review, merge, and verification.

Details: examples/llm-rust-python-compiler-sonnet/README.md

Why SWE-AF

Most agent frameworks wrap a single coder loop. SWE-AF is a coordinated engineering factory — planning, execution, and governance agents run as a control stack that adapts in real time.

• Hardness-aware execution — easy issues pass through quickly, while hard issues trigger deeper adaptation and DAG-level replanning instead of blind retries.
• Factory architecture — not a single-agent wrapper. Planning, execution, and governance agents run as a coordinated control stack — the architecture encodes the engineering strategy, not the prompts (see The Atomic Unit of Intelligence).
• Multi-model, multi-provider — assign different models per role (coder: opus, qa: haiku). Works with Claude, OpenRouter, OpenAI, and Google.
• Continual learning — with enable_learning=true, conventions and failure patterns discovered early are injected into downstream issues.
• Agent-scale parallelism — dependency-level scheduling + isolated git worktrees allow large fan-out without branch collisions.
• Fleet-scale orchestration — many SWE-AF nodes can run continuously in parallel via AgentField, driving thousands of agent invocations across concurrent builds.
• Explicit compromise tracking — when scope is relaxed, debt is typed, severity-rated, and propagated.
• Long-run reliability — checkpointed execution supports resume_build after crashes or interruptions.

In Action

PR #179: Go SDK DID/VC Registration — built entirely by SWE-AF (Claude runtime with haiku-class models). One API call, zero human code.

| Metric | Value | | ------------------- | ------------------ | | Issues completed | 10/10 | | Tests passing | 217 | | Acceptance criteria | 34/34 | | Agent invocations | 79 | | Model | claude-haiku-4-5 | | Total cost | $19.23 |

| Role | Cost | % | | ---------------------------------- | ----- | ----- | | Coder | $5.88 | 30.6% | | Code Reviewer | $3.48 | 18.1% | | QA | $1.78 | 9.2% | | GitHub PR | $1.66 | 8.6% | | Integration Tester | $1.59 | 8.3% | | Merger | $1.22 | 6.3% | | Workspace Ops | $1.77 | 9.2% | | Planning (PM + Arch + TL + Sprint) | $0.79 | 4.1% | | Verifier + Finalize | $0.34 | 1.8% | | Synthesizer | $0.05 | 0.2% |

79 invocations, 2,070 conversation turns. Planning agents scope and decompose; coders work in parallel isolated worktrees; reviewers and QA validate each issue; merger integrates branches; verifier checks acceptance criteria against the PRD.

Claude, open-source, and Codex models supported: Run builds with any runtime and tune models per role in one flat config map.

• runtime: "claude_code" maps to Claude backend.
• runtime: "open_code" maps to OpenCode backend (OpenRouter/OpenAI/Google/Anthropic model IDs).
• runtime: "codex" maps to the OpenAI Codex CLI backend.

Adaptive Factory Control

SWE-AF uses three nested control loops to adapt to task difficulty in real time:

| Loop | Scope | Trigger | Action | | ----------- | ------------- | -------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Inner loop | Single issue | QA/review fails | Coder retries with feedback | | Middle loop | Single issue | Inner loop exhausted | run_issue_advisor retries with a new approach, splits work, or accepts with debt | | Outer loop | Remaining DAG | Escalated failures | run_replanner restructures remaining issues and dependencies |

This is the core factory-control behavior: control agents supervise worker agents and continuously reshape