CRAFT is a preliminary set of comprehensive, responsible, adaptive, foundational, and translational values and principles proposed in Toward Agentic Software Engineering Beyond Code: Framing Vision, Values, and Vocabulary to guide community research and practice as agentic software engineering (SE) develops as a discipline. Most of its principles are framed as applying to both research and practice, with a few framed as primarily research-focused.
Usage
The five CRAFT values are: Comprehensive — agentic SE needs a ‘whole of process’ approach that includes human, agentic, and socio-technical aspects (e.g. the roles played by human and agent actors, human values, empathy, and emotional intelligence, and socio-technical aspects such as mutual trust, adoption barriers, coordination, and teamwork) in addition to core technological innovation. Responsible — agentic SE needs to apply an ethics-by-design approach, prioritizing accountability, reliability, safety, transparency, explainability, privacy, security, and human/societal/environmental wellbeing, and needs to ensure sustainability, since the planetary cost of AI technologies cannot be ignored and the SE community needs a long-term plan for a conscious transformation aligned with environmental sustainability values that handles the associated trade-offs. Adaptive — agentic SE researchers and practitioners need to adapt to new AI models and paradigms, working in tandem with the AI community and co-designing with industry, and need to predict and report the socio-technical impacts of changes in AI models and paradigms. Foundational — agentic SE needs to develop foundational knowledge (through empirical studies, taxonomies, and theories) and foundational solutions (tools, techniques, frameworks, platforms) that extend beyond coding and programming. Translational — agentic SE needs to build awareness through education, training, accreditation, certification, funding bodies, media, and incident logs, and needs to study and enable the translation of research knowledge and solutions into actionable, industry-friendly guidelines and tools for practice.