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Related papers: Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Codi…

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Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

The capabilities of AI-assisted coding are progressing at breakneck speed. Chat-based vibe coding has evolved into fully fledged AI-assisted, agentic software development using agent scaffolds where the human developer creates a plan that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Magnus Palmblad , Jared M. Ragland , Benjamin A. Neely

Modern AI agents optimize programs by refactoring source code to trigger trusted compiler transformations. This preserves program semantics and reduces source code pollution, making the program easier to maintain and portable across…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Akash Deo , Simone Campanoni , Tommy McMichen

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Rodrigo Morales , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

With the development of foundation model (FM), agentic AI systems are getting more attention, yet their inherent issues like hallucination and poor reasoning, coupled with the frequent ad-hoc nature of system design, lead to unreliable and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Minh-Dung Dao , Quy Minh Le , Hoang Thanh Lam , Duc-Trong Le , Quoc-Viet Pham , Barry O'Sullivan , Hoang D. Nguyen

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

AI coding assistants are now central to professional software development, yet their impact on how developers think about and practice security remains poorly understood. While prior work has documented vulnerability rates in AI-generated…

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Eman Abdullah AlOmar

Software testing has progressed toward intelligent automation, yet current AI-based test generators still suffer from static, single-shot outputs that frequently produce invalid, redundant, or non-executable tests due to the lack of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Saba Naqvi , Mohammad Baqar , Nawaz Ali Mohammad

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Danilo Silva , Nikolaos Tsantalis , Marco Tulio Valente

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Studies show that small-scale…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-16 James Ivers , Robert L. Nord , Ipek Ozkaya , Chris Seifried , Christopher S. Timperley , Marouane Kessentini

The rise of AI agents is transforming how software can be built. The promise of agents is that developers might write code quicker, delegate multiple tasks to different agents, and even write a full piece of software purely out of natural…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Ruanqianqian Huang , Avery Reyna , Sorin Lerner , Haijun Xia , Brian Hempel

AI coding agents can resolve real-world software issues, yet they frequently introduce regressions -- breaking tests that previously passed. Current benchmarks focus almost exclusively on resolution rate, leaving regression behavior…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Pepe Alonso , Sergio Yovine , Victor A. Braberman

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong coding capabilities but still struggle to solve competitive programming problems correctly in a single attempt. Execution-based re-ranking offers a promising test-time scaling strategy,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Zeyao Ma , Jing Zhang , Xiaokang Zhang , Jiaxi Yang , Zongmeng Zhang , Jiajun Zhang , Yuheng Jing , Lei Zhang , Hao Zheng , Wenting Zhao , Junyang Lin , Binyuan Hui

AI coding agents are increasingly acting as autonomous contributors by generating and submitting pull requests (PRs). However, we lack empirical evidence on how these agent-generated PRs differ from human contributions, particularly in how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Daniel Ogenrwot , John Businge

Refactoring is a constant activity in software development and maintenance. Scale and maintain software systems are based on code refactoring. However, this process is still labor intensive, as it requires programmers to analyze the…

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Hao Li , Haoxiang Zhang , Ahmed E. Hassan

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Siqi Wang , Xing Hu , Bei Wang , Wenxin Yao , Xin Xia , Xinyu Wang

Agentic coding tools receive goals written in natural language as input, break them down into specific tasks, and write or execute the actual code with minimal human intervention. Central to this process are agent context files ("READMEs…