Agent Factories for High-Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?

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Bhandwaldar, Choudhury, and Puri (IBM Research) empirically test how far general-purpose coding agents — without hardware-specific training — can optimize hardware designs from high-level specifications. Their 'agent factory' is a two-stage pipeline that constructs specialized optimization agents on the fly. Results show coding agents can meaningfully optimize HLS designs, but the paper maps specific failure modes. Relevant as a stress test of whether general-purpose coding agents generalize beyond software.