mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RefactorPlatform: An Open-Source Harness for Controlled Evaluation of Repository-Scale Refactoring Agents

arXiv 2609.04898 ↗First posted 4 Sep 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Repository-scale refactoring requires coding agents to propagate a single change across many interdependent files without altering program behavior, yet to our knowledge no existing harness isolates the design choices that determine agent success on this task. We present RefactorPlatform, an open-source evaluation harness that holds the environment fixed and varies each design axis explicitly: model backbone (via OpenRouter and GitHub Copilot CLI), execution regime (baseline, retrieval-augmented, and multi-agent), and prompt specificity. Each run executes in an isolated workspace with live terminal streaming, per-task logging of tokens, diffs, and transcripts, AST-based verification, and exportable telemetry for audit and reproduction. Demonstrating the platform on 100 multi-file RefactorBench tasks across four model families, we illustrate the analyses it supports: AST-aware chunking outperforms naive token-window chunking by 25-30% across prompt modes, whereas naive retrieval falls below the retrieval-free baseline; a lean retrieval-augmented single agent (86%) beats the sub-agent configuration we evaluated (66%) on matched tasks with no task passing under delegation that fails under retrieval; and retrieval's accuracy gains absorb its token overhead, leaving cost per successful refactoring unchanged. RefactorPlatform is open-sourced to make refactoring-agent evaluation reproducible and auditable.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

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14 of 25 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025A Comprehensive Empirical Evaluation of Agent Frameworks on Code-centric Software Engineering Tasks2 Nov
  2. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Benchmarks and Solutions in Software Engineering of LLM-Empowered Agentic System10 Oct
  3. 2025RepoTransAgent: Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Repository-Aware Code Translation25 Aug
  4. 2025LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Intelligent Refactoring of Haskell Code24 Jun
  5. 2024HyperAgent: Generalist Software Engineering Agents to Solve Coding Tasks at Scale9 Sep
  6. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  7. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents1 Jul
  8. 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development16 Jul

Other references · 6

  1. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  2. 2023Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 1,332
  3. 2020CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesiscited by 468
  4. 2025RefactorBench: Evaluating Stateful Reasoning in Language Agents Through Codecited by 28
  5. 2025cAST: Enhancing Code Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structural Chunking via Abstract Syntax Treecited by 17
  6. 2026SWE-Refactor: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Real-World LLM-Based Code Refactoringcited by 11

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  1. 2026"Refactoring Runaway": Understanding and Mitigating Tangled Refactorings in Coding Agents for Issue Resolution
  2. 2026REFINE: A Multi-Agent LLM Approach for Evidence-Guided Code Refactoring
  3. 2026SmellBench: Towards Fine-Grained Evaluation of Code Agents on Refactoring Tasks
  4. 2025MANTRA: Enhancing Automated Method-Level Refactoring with Contextual RAG and Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration
  5. 2025Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Coding Agents
  6. 2026Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?
  7. 2026How do Agents Refactor: An Empirical Study
  8. 2026SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?