mini-swe-agent: Instructions file for Codex

mini-SWE-agent overview

• mini-SWE-agent implements an AI software engineering agent that solves github issues and similar programming challenges
• The idea of this project is to write the simplest, smallest, most readable agent.

The project is structured as

minisweagent/__init__  # Protocols/interfaces for all base classes
minisweagent/agents  # Agent control flow & loop
minisweagent/environments  # Executing agent actions
minisweagent/models  # LM interfaces
minisweagent/run  # Run scripts that serve as an entry point

• The project embraces polymorphism: Every individual class should be simple, but we offer alternatives
• Every use case should start with a run script, that picks one agent, environment, and model class to run

Style guide

1. Target python 3.10 or higher
2. Use python with type annotations. Use list instead of List.
3. Use pathlib instead of os.path. Use Path.read_text() over with ...open() constructs.
4. Use typer to add interfaces
5. Keep code comments to a minimum and only highlight particularly logically challenging things
6. Do not append to the README unless specifically requested
7. Use jinja for formatting templates
8. Use dataclass for keeping track config
9. Do not catch exceptions unless explicitly told to.
10. Write concise, short, minimal code.
11. In most cases, avoid initializing variables just to pass them to a function. Instead just pass the expression to the function directly.
12. Not every exception has to be caught. Exceptions are a good way to show problems to a user.
13. This repository rewards minimal code. Try to be as concise as possible.

Here's an example for rule 11:

# bad
a = func()
Class(a)

# good
Class(func())

Test style

1. Use pytest, not unittest.
2. Do not mock/patch anything that you're not explicitly asked to do
3. Avoid writing trivial tests. Every test should test for at least one, preferably multiple points of failure
4. Avoid splitting up code in multiple lines like this: a=func()\n assert a=b. Instead, just do assert func() == b
5. The first argument to pytest.mark.parametrize should be a tuple (not a string! not a list!), the second argument must be a list (not a tuple!).