111–112 of 112 posts
In my experience everything that affects engineers affects an agent. Good abstractions, reasonably sized methods, good names, principled (intra & inter) service architecture, unit tests, etc. All of these things have historically been the job of engineers, because it helps other people contribute to the code. Now it helps other people and other agents contribute to the code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First author here. Please let me offer a clarification. Our notion of "clean" isn't to just ask the agent to write better code. Rather, we give it a list of 50-100s static analyzer rule violations (and code LOC), and ask to remove them. We then check if the rule violations are resolved. Using LLMs to rewrite code to remove these violations is a rather accepted practice. Sonar's existing one-shot LLM based approach [1…
I do wonder though, how does metric based factoring compare to expert intuition based factoring? Can the latter be emulated by agents? Are there studies?