From AI Copilots to Agent Swarms

What happened

The impact of AI on software development has been both profound and ever-evolving. Last year, I wrote about AMD’s plans to use AI not just for generating new lines of code, but also for other steps in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as triaging problems, debugging code, and testing the software.

For testing, the agents generate unit tests, and if those are passed, identify necessary integration and product-level tests. And finally, for the approval and release stage, agents prepare architecture summary, code change review and full test results for engineers’ review and approval and if approved, integrate the changes into the next release.

Today, engineers create AI agents in their own image: they teach AI what they know about the system, how they would fix an issue, and how they would implement a change. This is already a major technological advancement. Engineers can create multiple “AI versions” of themselves, allowing these agents to work in parallel, scaling their expertise far beyond the limits of individual productivity.

The limitation, however, is that these AI agents are still constrained by human thinking and human-defined approaches. AMD We believe the next major transformation in software engineering will occur when collaborative AI agent swarms can independently identify and develop solutions, guided by humans on what to solve rather than constrained by human assumptions about how the job should be done.

Instead of providing detailed instructions on how to solve a problem, engineers will define the issue, the desired outcome and the quality, performance, and system constraints allowing AI agents to determine the optimal path to a solution. A swarm of AI agents will then work in parallel to generate, evaluate, and refine multiple solution approaches.

These agents will automatically validate correctness, measure performance, test trade-offs, and compare alternative implementations against defined success criteria. Finally, AI agents will prepare ranked solution options, along with validation results and performance metrics, for engineer review and approval. The agents won’t be enhancing each step of the SDLC—they will be rewriting the SLDC themselves. To get to this point, we need to change how agents are trained.

Today, improvement occurs one engineer and one agent at a time: an engineer reviews the output, refines the prompt, and repeats the process. To scale beyond this model, agents must continuously learn from one another, reuse successful strategies, and improve collaboratively across projects and teams.

Why it matters

At the time, we were hoping for a 25 percent productivity boost from AI use over the course of two or three years. But with each new release, the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) improve dramatically—accelerating software development, increasing the quality of AI-generated code, and fundamentally reshaping how software is engineered.

Now, just one year later, we have surpassed our productivity target, achieving a 30 percent overall productivity boost through AI. On top of that, we are rethinking not only how we use AI within the SDLC, but the structure of the SDLC itself. We believe that the biggest AI revolution in software engineering is still ahead.

So far, we have largely been teaching AI how we perform tasks and asking it to mimic existing workflows. In many ways, this constrains AI to human patterns of thinking. The next transformation will come from collaborative swarms of AI agents capable of discovering solutions independently. AMD began developing AI systems for code generation, testing automation, bug analysis, and code review in 2024.

At the time, our objective was to achieve 25 percent AI-generated production code by 2027 while gradually automating larger portions of the SDLC. Measuring productivity is inherently challenging, but from the outset we have consistently tracked one objective metric: the percentage of source code generated by AI. Importantly, we count only code that passes all reviews and testing and is ultimately included in the final product.

While AI-generated code is certainly not the only contributor to productivity gains, it is one of the few metrics that can be measured objectively and consistently. By this metric, we have crossed the 20 percent mark at the beginning of this year and are now progressing toward 50 percent across entire codebase. In some software components, more than 80 percent of the code is now generated using AI.

Agentic AI has enabled us to include AI in every step of the lifecycle: For code analysis and triage, agents are trained to analyze problem reports, identify and group similar requests, and highlight which code snippets are likely to need modification. For debugging and code generation, agents are directed to analyze a bug request and implement required code changes.

What to watch

We are already moving in this direction by using multi-agent workflows extensively through agentic harnesses, such as Codex and Claude Code, while simultaneously developing our own internal multi-agent systems to support the next generation of AI-driven software engineering. A good example is our AI-driven effort to resolve issues in our Radeon Software eXperience (RSX).

RSX is a user interface component that allows users to configure and monitor graphics driver behavior. In October 2025, we began using AI agents to automatically debug and fix reported RSX issues.