Master Thesis: Beyond Git: Source Control Architecture for Agentic Software Development

As autonomous coding agents begin making changes in parallel, source control and CI systems face workloads far beyond those of typical human development teams. This master's thesis at Ericsson will examine the limits of Git-based workflows and compare alternative architectures for development involving hundreds of agents. Experiments with up to around 500 concurrent agents will explore scaling, integration reliability and resource demands.

The assignment

• Create a reproducible simulation environment for up to around 500 coding agents, with realistic tasks and codebases that vary in size and modularity.
• Measure Git performance under increasing agent activity, including repository growth, throughput, branch contention, merge conflicts, retries and queue delays.
• Assess the effects on CI build and test workloads, wasted computation, and compute, memory, storage and network consumption.
• Investigate how frequently changes that merge without conflicts nevertheless cause behavioral failures as agent numbers increase.
• Compare alternatives such as trunk-based workflows, merge queues, file- or symbol-level change models, stacked changes and speculative merging.
• Develop metrics and a benchmarking approach for fair comparisons, explore relevant solutions at other large software companies, and recommend improvements to source control and CI.

Who we are looking for

• Knowledge of computer science, software engineering or a related discipline.
• Strong understanding of Git, continuous integration, Linux environments and Bash.
• Programming experience in at least one language; Python is an advantage.
• Interest in distributed systems, performance measurement and experimental research, together with a willingness to learn.
• Experience with LLM-powered coding agents or agent frameworks.
• Experience with containers and orchestration tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Applicants who meet most, rather than all, of the listed qualifications are encouraged to apply.

What we offer

• Flexibility to shape the research directions within the project's scope.

Practical details

Location: Lund. Master's thesis at Ericsson.