Optimizing AI Agents for Automated Software Engineering with Palimpzest

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents is transforming the software development landscape. Increasingly more engineers are using natural language agents to expedite and guide development workflows, while large organizations are investing heavily on building agentic systems for tasks such as code generation and code repair. A key challenge in developing such systems is tuning agent hyperparameters— settings that affect performance such as choice of model, temperature settings, and context window sizes. As system complexity grows, the hyperparameter space expands, complicating optimization under real-world compute and time constraints. In this work, we present Palimpzest[1] as an agentic optimizer able to balance cost and performance objectives by tuning agentic hyperparameters. We demonstrate that Palimpzest can tune our agent hyperparameters at 8.5 times lower cost and with 24 times greater time efficiency compared to the conventional grid search. By integrating our custom-built Debugger and Code Editor Agents as new operators within Palimpzest, we enhance the system’s ability to resolve real-world GitHub issues. And to facilitate hyperparameter selection, we also introduce File Coverage, Report Accuracy, and Patch Similarity along with the traditional SWE-Bench Score as quality evaluation methods used by Palimpzest’s optimization loop. When evaluated on the SWE-Bench Lite[2] benchmark, our optimized system achieves a 15% score at a significantly lower cost compared to previous approaches.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Li, Jason

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cafarella, Michael

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162708

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162708