It should be noted that MaxSAT 2024 did not include z3, as with many competitions. It’s possible (I’d argue likely) that the agent picked up on techniques from Z3 or some other non-competing solver, rather than actually discovering some novel approach.

Prof. Cunxi Yu and his students at UMD is working on this exact topic and published a paper on agents for improving SAT solvers [1].

I believe they are extending this idea to EDA / chip design tools and algorithms which are also computationally challenging to solve. They have an accepted paper on this for logic synthesis which will come out soon.

[1] "Autonomous Code Evolution Meets NP-Completeness", https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07367